What other forums are there for theses-realted topics? I need help with citing a method in my paper.

[mcfilu]

Hi!
I am not sure if I am in the right forum here to ask this question. So my first question is:

Can you recommend other forums for research/thesis-related questions? Eg. on statistics, citing, ... I am a Psychology master student.

The other question I have is about citation. I am writing my paper on physioloical regulation in psychiatric patients. Put shortly, I received physiological data (namely RSA, respiratory sinus arrythmia) from my supervisor. I am currently writing my methods part of the thesis, and I have no idea, how the RSA data was transformed/extracted from the original recordings from the ECG. This transformation was done by a cooperator from another University, so my supervisor could not really give me information on that. I am now wondering, how do I describe or cite that in my paper? Could I just write something like this: "The transformation into RSA values was conducted by collaborators XY...."? Do you have any paper example in which a method was "outsourced"?

Thank you in advance!

[bibliophile222]

3 hours ago, mcfilu said:

Hi!
I am not sure if I am in the right forum here to ask this question. So my first question is:

Can you recommend other forums for research/thesis-related questions? Eg. on statistics, citing, ... I am a Psychology master student.

The other question I have is about citation. I am writing my paper on physioloical regulation in psychiatric patients. Put shortly, I received physiological data (namely RSA, respiratory sinus arrythmia) from my supervisor. I am currently writing my methods part of the thesis, and I have no idea, how the RSA data was transformed/extracted from the original recordings from the ECG. This transformation was done by a cooperator from another University, so my supervisor could not really give me information on that. I am now wondering, how do I describe or cite that in my paper? Could I just write something like this: "The transformation into RSA values was conducted by collaborators XY...."? Do you have any paper example in which a method was "outsourced"?

Thank you in advance!

I would check out your school's writing center, particularly if they have separate writing centers for grad and undergrad. They should have some helpful resources on citation, and you may get lucky and meet with a consultant who is familiar with your stats method.

Disclaimer: I'm a consultant at my school's grad writing center and never fail to plug it when I can. ?

[Meraki]

Typically readers will want to know enough about your methods to potentially do a replication, if desired. Failure to disclose enough about the methods could lead to a rejection if you are submitting it to a journal, or at least a revision requesting the missing information. Not stating how something was done can also raise some eyebrows as to the validity of the method and subsequent results if the method and/or author is unfamiliar. However, if this is a relatively common method in your field - and you personally just don't happen to know how it's done - you might get away with being more broad, as readers will know what you're referring to or be able to find other sources to inform them. 

In the latter case, I've seen papers say something like, "The transformation was conducted by a member of the research team as suggested/conducted by Author et al. (2016)." They don't go into details themselves, but rather point the reader to another paper if they care to know the details. However, in order to write it up that way, you still need some idea of what was done and who might have established the method or used it in another paper. Can you reach out to the cooperator yourself and ask if they have a few minutes to discuss the method?