Tuesday 19 December 2017

A researcher needs to be self critic

Research is the process of synthesising knowledge and no body can guarantee that today's knowledge can long last as a fact, rather, tomorrow it may be a blender. In fact, knowledge is dynamic, not a static rigid; but the fact is unique and it is our limitation that we take a span of time to get refined out of the time to time dynamic knowledge to reach up to the set goal of fact. Perhaps, our mistakes are attributed to our limitations once. In order to avoid misleading the scientific community, your old mistakes, once identified after crossed over the period of limitations, should be corrected and for which one needs to be self critic, especially the researchers. Keeping in mind this ethical fact, somehow I tried to read again my earlier research publications and painfully I could realize that there happened some serious mistakes in interpreting the data in some of my old publications, which I felt irrelevant and needs to be corrected. It was necessary and I had requested for the withdrawal (or requested retraction as per the journals' publishing policy) of that published works, and the editorial board of that journals could understand my ethical overflow and had done the job to  my level of satisfaction. I strongly believe that researchers need to be self critic, always be recalled of their old mistakes in history, for the needful corrections and further supposed to be getting refined at all. Therefore, research is the process of reaching the ultimate fact through the synthesis of dynamic knowledge. I hope the process of self refinement is inevitable for every researcher, which has been gone through in my case and now I am happy that I seem to be much enthusiastic and highly inquisitive in my research career than ever before.

Adding to it on 20 Jan 2018: Recently, I got an invitation from a top journal regarding the republication of one of my articles previously published in JOSC.  From the words of Editorial office, it was written such that with reference to the article you had reverted from JOSC We feel that the topic of the article is very interesting. Therefore, we are delighted to invite you to publish your work in our journal. Following was my reply to the editor:


Dear Sir
Thank you for your interest in considering the Republication of one of my articles that I reverted from JOSC for comprehensive corrections. In fact, this article was reverted after my repeated request to do so as I have found some serious errors throughout the manuscript in interpreting the data. I had convinced this to my coauthors and the journal editorial board and finally it came to the stage today what it is. During the analysis as well as pre publication stages, nobody could identify the errors. It could be only identified during the progress in my research in this field and it was realized that it was due to the limitations of our knowledge that time the error occurred. An erratum was published at one stage but it was found insufficient and unsatisfied further. So it was my ethical concern that nobody should further cite that paper, so I decided to revert this paper myself for further corrections as being the first and corresponding author, in consultation with my coauthors. I have almost corrected the anomalies in this paper and had again requested the same journal for considering its Republication. Editor's response is pending and after hearing their decision only I can think about other journal options to get it republished.

Thanking you
Faithfully
Dr.Arun

Sunday 17 December 2017

Invited lecture in ICMS 2017

Recently delivered an invited lecture on the SWOC Analysis of Green synthesis for metallic oxide nanoparticles in International Conference on Molecular Spectroscopy (ICMS 2017), jointly organized by IIUCNN & IUMSE at MG University, Kottayam.