Application of ICT

in Research

By: Gaurav Soin

Application of ICT in research
ICTs in higher education in not only used in research and
academic works but also being used for developing online
course material; delivering study content and sharing
content with remotely located students; communication
between learners, teachers and the outside world;creation
and delivery of presentation and lectures; academic
research; administrative support, enrolment, test,
evaluation and many more.
The role of ICT Technology Role of Technology in Higher
Education/Research and academic work can be broadly divided into 4
major areas: -

● Communication – How ICT has changed the way researcher

communicate with other parties
● Information sharing – How quickly & easily information can be
shared across the globe
● Simulation – Virtual Lab & robotic experiments
● Evaluation- Various tools and technology for feedback and
evaluation
ICT helps researcher in the following
research related tasks
● Literature survey & critically analyses known information for further
reading
● use information to extend and communicate knowledge across subject
area fields with wide community
● Choose Methods for research (Q&Q)
● Data Collection - manage information/data collectively
● Referencing
● Present / share / disseminate Instantaneous information exchange
despite geographical distances, costless accumulation of data and
documents
● search multiple databases and electronic resources simultaneously
● retrieve results in a common format to consume
● link to others individual databases for more specialized searching &
● select favorite resources and e-journals, save searches and records,
and setup email alerts.
Application of ICT has many effects on Research.
They are classified into three Categories:

● Application of ICT in pre-data analysis

● Application of ICT in data analysis
● Application of ICT in post-data analysis
Application of ICT in pre-data analysis
● Literature Search
● Content Search
● Literature Tracking
● Data Collection
Application of ICT in data analysis
● Quantitative Data Analysis
● Qualitative Data Analysis
Application of ICT in post-data analysis
● References & Bibliography Compilation
● Article, Thesis/Dissertation Discussion among
Researchers & Supervisors
● Plagiarism Detection
● Journal Manuscripts Submission
Search Engine & Research Papers
● Google Scholar – Provides a way to broadly search for scholarly
literature across disciplines and sources.
● Microsoft Academic Search – Find information about academic papers,
authors, conferences, journals, and organizations from multiple sources.
● Sciencescape – Innovation in the exploration of papers and authors.
● ResearchGate - ResearchGate is the professional network for scientists
and researchers.
● Biohunter – Portal with literature search, data statistics, reading, sorting,
storing, field expert identification and journal finder.
● Academia.edu -is a platform for academics to share research papers.
The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research.
● SSRN – Multi-disciplinary online repository of scholarly research and
related materials in social sciences.
● DeepDyve- provides simple and affordable access to millions of articles
across thousands of peer-reviewed journals. Content from the world's
leading publishers including Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell,
and more.
● Wiki Journal Club – Open, user-reviewed summaries of the top studies
in medical research.
Shared Dataset & Code
● DataBank – Analysis and visualization tool that contains collections of time
series data on a variety of topics.
● ai.google- Google periodically releases data of interest to researchers in a
wide range of computer science disciplines.
● GitHub – Online software project hosting using the Git revision control
system.
● Open Science Framework – Gathers a network of research documents, a
version control system, and a collaboration software.
● SlideShare – Community for sharing presentations and other professional
content
● Data.gov.uk- The British government’s official data portal offers access to
tens of thousands of data sets on topics such as crime, education,
transportation, and health
● Data.gov- The USA government’s official data portal offers access to tens of
thousands of data sets
● Data.gov.in- Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India - is a platform for
supporting Open Data initiative of Government of India. The portal is intended
to be used by Government of India Ministries/ Departments their
organizations to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications
collected by them for public use. It intends to increase transparency in the
functioning of Government and also open avenues for many more innovative
uses of Government Data to give different perspective.
● Code Ocean – Cloud-based computational platform which provides a way to
share, discover and run published code.
● Peer Evaluation – Open repository for data, papers, media coupled with an
open review and discussion platform.
● Datacatalogs.org offers open government data from US, EU, Canada,
CKAN, and more.
● Google Finance 40 years’ worth of stock market data, updated in real time.
● You can also use https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch to search
required data set.
Connect & Communicate with experts & researchers
● Academia – A place to share and follow research and researchers.
● LifeScience.net – Online platform for professional networking and sharing of
knowledge in life sciences.
● Open Science Framework – Gathers a network of research documents, a
version control system, and a collaboration software.
● ResearchGate – Social network for researchers.
● AcademicJoy – Sharing research ideas and story in research and
innovation.
● Experiment – Crowdfunding Platform for Scientific Research.
● Linkedin- Connect with people in your area of interest.
● Thinkable – Platform to mobilize knowledge and fund breakthrough ideas.
● ScienceOpen – Freely accessible research network to share and evaluate
scientific information .
● Communication tools- web-ex, skype, TeamViewers, anywhere
Free Digital Library
● The National Digital library of India is a project under Ministry of Human
Resource Development, India. The objective is to integrate several
national and international digital libraries in one single web-portal. The
NDL provides free access to many books in English and the Indian
languages.
● Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies,
software, music, websites, and more. The Internet Archive offers over
12,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a
collection of 550,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone.
● The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of
India has launched A National Repository of Open Educational
Resources (NROER ) .
 The development of it has been a combined effort of the Department of
School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource
Development, Government of India, the Central Institute of Educational
Technology, National Council of Educational Research and Training and
Metastudio, which is the platform that hosts the Repository.

● The ultimate goal of the Open Library is to make all the published works
of humankind available to everyone in the world. While large in scope and
ambition, this goal is within our grasp. Achieving it will require the
participation of librarians, authors, government officials and technologists.
● ManyBooks provides free ebooks for your PDA, iPod or eBook
Reader. You can randomly browse for a ebook through the most
popular titles, recommendations or recent reviews for visitors. There
are 21,282 eBooks available here and they’re all free!
● GetFreeEBooks is a free ebooks site where you can download free
books totally free. All the ebooks within the site are legal
downloadable free ebooks
Simulation/Lab and project management
● Internet of things is coming to laboratories and connecting instrumentation
to the internet allowing us to perform experiments from anywhere in the world.
● Virtual Labs project is an initiative of Ministry of Human Resource
Development (MHRD), Government of India under the aegis of National
Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology
(NMEICT). This project is a consortium activity of twelve participating
institutes and IIT Delhi is coordinating institute. It is a paradigm shift in
ICT-based education. For the first time, such an initiative has been taken-up
in remote‐experimentation.
● Lab Suit – Inventory Management, orders Management, materials Trade-In,
price Comparison.
● Life technologies Lab Management Tool – Management tool for
lab equipment and services.
● LiveLabSpace – Collaborative research tool that lets you plan
experiments, replicate outcomes and generate research papers
Write & publish research papers
Various online available writing tools are needs of researchers. Tools are required
to store and manage references, collaborations across labs and continents,
collaborative writing tools & track of the modifications done by others to the
manuscript.

● CitationStyles – Find and edit CSL citation styles.

● Papers – Helps you collect and curate the research material that you’re
passionate about.
● Zotero – Helps you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources
● Draft – Version control and collaboration to improve your writing.
● Typewrite – A simple, real-time collaborative writing environment.
● ScienceOpen – Freely accessible research network to share and evaluate
scientific information.
ICT in Research Sponsored by Govt. of India
India has been ranked 121st among 157 countries in terms of progress in
the realm of information and communication technology (ICT) in a
newly-released report of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU),
which makes an annual assessment based on a wide range of
parameters and data

• National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT) is a major

initiative of the Govt. of India in this direction with an aim to leverage the
potential of ICT in providing high quality personalized and interactive
content, free of cost, to all the learners.
● The National Mission on Education through Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) has, under its aegis, created Virtual
Labs, Open Source and Access Tools, Virtual Conference Tools, Talk
to Teacher programs, a Non-Invasive Blood Glucometer and also for
simulated lab experiments, a Di. Electric frequency shifts application
development of resonator for low cost oscillators.