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Open data in Indian academia.where are we and where do we need to go? (52)

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R.V. College of Engineering · Posted
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This is a space to share what is actually working for you in terms of research productivity tools. Be specific.what exactly do you use it for and why does it work?

I'll start:

I use Obsidian as my primary research knowledge base. Each paper I read gets a note with:

  • 3-sentence summary
  • Key contributions
  • Limitations (often more useful than contributions)
  • Connection to my work

I also maintain a 'daily research log' where I write for 15 minutes each morning about what I am stuck on. This has been more valuable than any productivity system I have tried.

For writing: Overleaf for LaTeX, but I draft initial versions in plain markdown.

For references: Zotero with the Better BibTeX plugin. Essential.

What is working for you?

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84 Replies

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Sunil Bhattacharya Active 390 pts · Accepted answer

+1 to everything said above. My experience was identical.

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Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Replying to Bindiya Thomas
Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

0
Replying to Bindiya Thomas
Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

0
Replying to Bindiya Thomas
Divya Krishnan Growing 85 pts · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?

0
Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

0
Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

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Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

0
Admin NITK · Accepted answer

I'd push back slightly on the idea that industry collaboration is universally beneficial for academic research. The incentive misalignment is real.

Industry partners want deliverables on a schedule. Academic research is often exploratory and unpredictable. When the two clash, it is usually the researcher who has to compromise.either by rushing results, constraining publication, or steering away from results that are inconvenient for the sponsor.

This doesn't mean industry collaboration is bad. But the terms matter enormously. IP rights, publication rights, and the ability to pursue negative results should be negotiated upfront and protected in writing.

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Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Replying to Chirag Mehta
Bhavana Reddy Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

If you are not already using a reading group format with your students, I would strongly recommend it. Forces everyone to articulate what they read.

0
Replying to Chirag Mehta
Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Replying to Chirag Mehta
Nandita Ghosh Distinguished 720 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

0
Meena Sharma · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

0
Replying to Karthik Rajan
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

Marking this as the accepted answer. Incredibly helpful and specific. Really appreciate you taking the time.

0
Replying to Karthik Rajan
Jaya Lakshmanan Growing 50 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

0
Replying to Karthik Rajan
Vikram Bhatia Active 420 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

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Aditya Sharma Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

0
Replying to Aditya Sharma
Manish Tiwari Starting 10 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Replying to Aditya Sharma
Shiva Prasad Active 480 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

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Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

I think you are conflating two separate problems here. The publish-or-perish culture creates pressure, yes.but the solution is not to criticize researchers who are navigating an unfair system. The real problem is with evaluation committees who treat publication count as a proxy for research quality. Fix the evaluation, and the incentives change.

Also worth noting: open review has been implemented in some fields and has its own problems. It can disadvantage early-career researchers who fear retaliation from senior colleagues they have reviewed critically.

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Replying to Pooja Nambiar
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

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Replying to Pooja Nambiar
Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

0
Replying to Pooja Nambiar
Disha Malhotra Starting 8 pts · Accepted answer

I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.

0
Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

0
Meena Sharma · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

0
Ashwin Murthy Distinguished 560 pts · Accepted answer

FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) is widely accepted and preferable to Bonferroni when you have many tests and limited power. The key is to be explicit about which correction you used and why.

On replication: No independent cohort is a genuine limitation but not a dealbreaker for rare disease research, where cohort availability is a known constraint. Many high-quality papers acknowledge this and still get published in good journals. Frame it as future work.

Power analysis: Yes, report it. Showing you are aware of the limitation is better than not mentioning it.

0
Sunil Bhattacharya Active 390 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

0
Replying to Sunil Bhattacharya
Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

0
Replying to Sunil Bhattacharya
Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

0
Xena D'Souza Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

0
Om Prakash Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

0
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

0
Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

0
Replying to Arjun Venkatesan
Nandita Ghosh Distinguished 720 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

0
Replying to Arjun Venkatesan
Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 pts · Accepted answer

I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.

0
Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

I'd push back slightly on the idea that industry collaboration is universally beneficial for academic research. The incentive misalignment is real.

Industry partners want deliverables on a schedule. Academic research is often exploratory and unpredictable. When the two clash, it is usually the researcher who has to compromise.either by rushing results, constraining publication, or steering away from results that are inconvenient for the sponsor.

This doesn't mean industry collaboration is bad. But the terms matter enormously. IP rights, publication rights, and the ability to pursue negative results should be negotiated upfront and protected in writing.

0
Replying to Bindiya Thomas
Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

0
Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Jagdish Rawat · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Sowmya Narayanan Active 310 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

0
Replying to Sowmya Narayanan
Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

0
Replying to Sowmya Narayanan
Rekha Shetty Starting 40 pts · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?

0
Replying to Sowmya Narayanan
test tester Growing 165 pts · Accepted answer

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out in detail. This is going straight into my research notes.

0
Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

Respectfully, I think this framing misses the systemic dimension. Individual researchers cannot solve a collective action problem. If you submit to open-access journals and your colleague submits to Nature, your colleague gets the promotion. Until evaluation criteria change at the institutional level.which requires policy intervention.individual choices have minimal impact.

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Geeta Rao · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Quamar Ahmed Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

The short answer: it depends heavily on the journal and field, but here is a general framework.

If your null result is well-powered and the hypothesis was reasonable: Absolutely publish it. Null results in well-designed studies are as valuable as positive results. Journals like PLOS ONE explicitly welcome them.

If your study is underpowered: Be transparent about it. Report effect sizes and confidence intervals, not just p-values. A small, underpowered study with honest reporting is still a contribution.

What kills papers is when limitations are obvious but the authors have not addressed them.

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Replying to Yogesh Pandey
Admin NITK · Accepted answer

Thank you for the honest take. This is the kind of answer I was looking for.not the sanitized version.

0
Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?

0
Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

+1 to everything said above. My experience was identical.

0
Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Rekha Shetty Starting 40 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

0
Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Revathi Chandrasekaran Active 410 pts · Accepted answer

Marking this as the accepted answer. Incredibly helpful and specific. Really appreciate you taking the time.

0
Zara Hussain Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

0
Priya Nair · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

0
Replying to Priya Nair
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.

0
Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

Respectfully, I think this framing misses the systemic dimension. Individual researchers cannot solve a collective action problem. If you submit to open-access journals and your colleague submits to Nature, your colleague gets the promotion. Until evaluation criteria change at the institutional level.which requires policy intervention.individual choices have minimal impact.

0
Fatima Sheikh Growing 95 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Vikram Bhatia Active 420 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

0
Replying to Vikram Bhatia
Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

0
Anita Rao · Accepted answer

I have a slightly different take from my experience in industry research. The reproducibility crisis is real but unevenly distributed. Fields with strong engineering culture (computational biology, ML with benchmarks) have actually improved significantly in the last 5 years. The bigger problem is in fields where data sharing is structurally difficult.clinical medicine, behavioral economics.

The ML community's move toward open code and reproducibility checklists has been genuinely effective.

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Ashwin Murthy Distinguished 560 pts · Accepted answer

As a senior faculty member (25 years in the system), I want to offer a different perspective. Yes, the pressures are real. But I have also seen the other side: students who produce excellent work, publish honestly, and build reputations over time. The system is imperfect but not entirely broken.

What has actually helped my students: choosing venues carefully (a few strong papers rather than many weak ones), developing genuine collaborations rather than transactional coauthorships.

0
Ravi Patel Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

0
Replying to Ravi Patel
Sowmya Narayanan Active 310 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

0
Replying to Ravi Patel
Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

0
Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Zara Hussain Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

0
Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

Flower (flwr) is the most actively maintained and research-friendly federated learning framework right now. My group has been using it for 18 months on a healthcare project with 4 hospital sites.

Strengths:

  • Clean simulation API that lets you test on a single machine before deploying
  • Good support for custom aggregation strategies (FedProx, FedNova)
  • Active Discord community with quick responses from the maintainers

For non-IID data specifically, look at the FedProx strategy.it handles heterogeneous data distributions much better than FedAvg.

0
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Revathi Chandrasekaran Active 410 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for the honest take. This is the kind of answer I was looking for.not the sanitized version.

0
Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Indira Balan · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

0
Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Ekta Choudhary Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Aditya Sharma Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Replying to Aditya Sharma
Rajesh Kumar · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

0
Replying to Aditya Sharma
Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

0
Quamar Ahmed Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

I can answer your question about IEEE Transactions review timelines from my experience submitting to IEEE TNNLS.

For Q1 IEEE journals, expect:

  • Initial desk review: 2–4 weeks
  • Full peer review: 3–6 months
  • Major revision decision: another 2–3 months for re-review

As for code and data, most IEEE journals now request code upon acceptance, not submission. Regarding your 2.3% improvement.that is borderline. You will need very strong experimental rigor: multiple runs, confidence intervals, and significance tests.

0
Replying to Quamar Ahmed
Indira Balan · Accepted answer

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out in detail. This is going straight into my research notes.

0
Replying to Quamar Ahmed
Ravi Patel Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

If you are not already using a reading group format with your students, I would strongly recommend it. Forces everyone to articulate what they read.

0
Replying to Quamar Ahmed
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

Much appreciated. I will restructure my proposal along these lines. The point about societal impact being substantive is something I would have gotten wrong.