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Is citation count still a valid metric for research impact? (68)

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Growing 180 pts 0 followers
Bearys Institute of Technology · Posted
Education Technology Neuroscience

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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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Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 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.

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Manish Tiwari Starting 10 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Indira Balan · Accepted answer

This is very reassuring. I was worried the null result would kill the paper but your framing around transparency and effect sizes makes a lot of sense.

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 pts · 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.

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Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

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Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Tara Singh Starting 5 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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Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.