Which statement correctly distinguishes a reference list from a bibliography?

A reference list contains only the works actually cited in the text, while a bibliography lists all works consulted, whether cited or not.

A bibliography contains only the works actually cited, while a reference list includes all background reading.

A reference list is arranged chronologically and a bibliography alphabetically.

The two terms are interchangeable and differ only in the discipline that uses them.

Which of the following is the national repository of electronic theses and dissertations submitted to Indian universities, maintained by INFLIBNET?

National Digital Library of India

Thesis Writing, Publication Ethics & ICT in Research

The second half of Unit 2 is the part candidates most often lose marks on, because it looks like general knowledge and is actually a set of precise definitions. What exactly separates a symposium from a seminar? Is a reference list the same thing as a bibliography? Which number belongs to a journal and which to a book? What percentage of similarity attracts no penalty at all? Every one of these has a single correct answer, and NTA has asked all of them. This chapter also covers the ethics half of the syllabus — plagiarism, the FFP triad, informed consent, authorship — and the ICT tools a modern research scholar in India is expected to know by name.

Structure and Format of a Thesis

A thesis is built in three parts: the preliminaries that come before Chapter 1, the main body of numbered chapters, and the end matter that follows the last chapter. The exam almost always tests placement — which item sits in which part — so read the table as a map, not as prose. One rule solves most items: anything that helps the reader find things (title page, contents, list of tables, abstract) is preliminary; anything that lets the reader verify things (bibliography, appendices, the research tool itself) is end matter.

The three parts of a thesis and what belongs in each
Part	Contents, in order	Purpose
Preliminaries (front matter)	Title page; declaration by the candidate; certificate of the supervisor; acknowledgements; table of contents; list of tables and figures; list of abbreviations and symbols; abstract or synopsis.	Establishes authenticity and originality, and lets a reader navigate the volume.
Chapter 1 — Introduction	Background of the study; statement of the problem; objectives; hypotheses or research questions; operational definitions of terms; scope and delimitations; significance; limitations.	Tells the examiner what was studied and why it was worth studying.
Chapter 2 — Review of Literature	A critical, thematically organised survey of previous Indian and foreign studies, ending in a statement of the research gap.	Shows the work is not duplication and locates it in an existing conversation.
Chapter 3 — Research Methodology	Research design; population and sampling technique with justification; description, reliability and validity of tools; procedure of data collection; statistical techniques used.	Makes the study replicable — the chapter a second researcher would follow to repeat it.
Chapter 4 — Analysis and Interpretation	Tables and figures, objective-wise analysis, hypothesis-wise testing, and interpretation of each result.	Presents evidence; every table must be discussed, never left to speak for itself.
Chapter 5 — Findings, Conclusion, Suggestions	Summary of the study; major findings; conclusions; educational implications; suggestions for further research.	Converts results into knowledge and hands the next question to the next scholar.
End matter (back matter)	Bibliography or references; appendices (the questionnaire, permission letters, raw data, computations); glossary; index; list of the scholar’s own publications.	Lets an examiner verify every claim and reuse every tool.

🧠 Where does the abstract go?

The abstract is written last but placed first — it belongs to the preliminaries, not the end matter, and it is normally the final thing a scholar drafts because only then does he know what the thesis actually found. A good abstract compresses problem, method, findings and conclusion into one page with no citations and no new material. Remember the pair: acknowledgements before Chapter 1, appendices after the last chapter. Both begin with an "a", and the exam has used exactly that confusion.

Thesis, Dissertation, Paper, Article, Monograph, Review

Six kinds of research writing — length, purpose and originality
Form	Submitted or published where	Defining feature
Thesis	Submitted to a university for a doctoral degree (PhD).	Must make an original contribution to knowledge; longest; defended in a viva-voce before external examiners.
Dissertation	Submitted for a Master’s or MPhil degree.	Shorter; demonstrates that the candidate can apply an existing method competently; originality is desirable but not the test.
Research paper	Published in a peer-reviewed journal or presented at a conference.	Reports one study in a fixed short format, usually abstract-introduction-method-results-discussion.
Article	A journal, magazine or edited volume.	The broader term: any published piece of writing. A research paper is one kind of article; a general or opinion article need not report new data.
Monograph	Published as a single non-serial book.	A detailed scholarly treatment of one narrow subject, usually by one author, exhaustive rather than broad. Gets an ISBN, not an ISSN.
Review article	Published in a journal, often an invited or a review-only journal.	Collects and synthesises what others have already published; it generates no new primary data. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are its rigorous forms.

⚠️ Thesis versus dissertation — answer the Indian convention

In Indian and British usage, which UGC and NTA follow, a thesis is for the doctorate and a dissertation is for the Master’s or MPhil. In much of American usage the two are swapped — the dissertation is the doctoral work. When the paper asks, answer by the Indian convention: thesis equals PhD. A second trap: a synopsis is the short proposal submitted before registration or along with the thesis, whereas an abstract summarises a completed work; they are not interchangeable.

Formats of Academic Events — Seminar to Webinar

This is one of the highest-frequency comparisons in the whole of Paper-1, and it is pure definition — no reasoning will save you if the definitions are blurred. Learn each event by a single distinguishing question: who talks, how many of them, and how much does the audience participate?

Academic events compared — the frequently asked table
Event	Size and who speaks	Distinguishing feature
Seminar	Small group; a scholar or student presents a paper, then all discuss.	From the Latin seminarium, a "seed plot" — a teaching-learning format built on presentation plus critical discussion. Interaction is high.
Conference	Large; many delegates, often parallel technical sessions, keynote address, invited talks.	The most formal and largest format, organised by an association or institution on a broad theme over one or more days.
Symposium	Several experts each speak briefly on a different aspect of one single topic, before an audience.	One topic seen from many expert angles; more formal and less interactive than a seminar — the audience mainly listens, questions come at the end.
Workshop	Small group; a resource person guides while participants themselves practise.	The only hands-on, skill-building format — the output is a competence or a product (a question bank, a lesson plan), not a paper.
Colloquium	An invited or visiting speaker addresses a department, then takes questions.	Informal academic meeting, usually a departmental lecture series; the audience largely sets the agenda by questioning the speaker on a topic of his choice.
Panel discussion	Three to six panellists plus a moderator, in front of an audience.	The panellists talk to one another, not just to the audience; the moderator keeps balance. Designed to display conflicting viewpoints.
Webinar	Any number; a presenter and remote participants joined by video conferencing.	Literally web + seminar — the medium, not the format, is what makes it a webinar; interaction happens through chat, polls and a raised-hand button.

🧠 Four one-word keys

Seminar = paper. Symposium = one topic, many experts. Workshop = hands. Panel = argument. Add two more if you want full marks: conference = scale (largest, parallel sessions) and colloquium = guest. A useful cross-check: the workshop is the only one where you do something rather than say something, and the panel discussion is the only one designed so that the speakers may openly disagree with each other.

Related words appear as distractors and are worth one line each. A convention is a large general assembly of the members of a body; a conclave or summit is a meeting of a small number of high-level participants; a plenary session is the part of a conference that all delegates attend together, as opposed to parallel sessions; a poster session lets many researchers display work visually and answer visitors individually; a keynote address sets the theme at the opening; an extension lecture is a single talk by an outside expert to an institution; and a viva-voce is the oral defence of a submitted thesis.

Referencing, Citation Styles and the Bibliography

Citation does three jobs at once: it gives credit to the original author, gives the reader a trail to verify your claim, and protects you from the charge of plagiarism. Every style has two halves that must agree — an in-text citation in the body and a full entry in the list at the end. Styles differ mainly in how the in-text half looks: a name with a year, a name with a page number, a footnote number, or a bracketed serial number.

Major citation styles and where each is used
Style	Full name and home discipline	How the in-text citation looks
APA	American Psychological Association — psychology, education, social sciences.	Author-date: (Sharma, 2019). The end list is headed References.
MLA	Modern Language Association — literature, languages, humanities.	Author-page: (Sharma 42), no comma, no year. The end list is headed Works Cited.
Chicago / Turabian	History, arts, and publishing generally.	Two systems: notes-bibliography (superscript number leading to a footnote or endnote) or author-date.
IEEE	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — engineering, computing.	Numeric in square brackets in order of first appearance; the reference list is numbered, not alphabetical.
Vancouver	Medicine and health sciences.	Numeric, like IEEE, following the ICMJE recommendations.
Harvard	A family of author-date styles used widely in the United Kingdom and Australia.	Author-date like APA, but punctuation varies by institution.

⚠️ Reference list is not a bibliography

A reference list contains only the works actually cited in the text — every entry must have a matching in-text citation and every citation must have a matching entry. A bibliography is wider: it lists everything consulted for the study, cited or not, and may even include recommended background reading. So a bibliography can be longer than the reference list, never shorter. Two related terms: "Works Cited" is MLA’s name for a reference list, and an annotated bibliography adds a short evaluative note under each entry. Also distinguish ibid. (in the same source as the note just above) from op. cit. (in a work already cited earlier) and et al. (and the other authors).

Journals, Peer Review and Citation Metrics

Peer review is the gate: before publication a manuscript is judged by independent experts in the same field who advise the editor to accept, revise or reject it. In single-blind review the referee knows the author but not the reverse; in double-blind review neither knows the other, which reduces bias about institution, gender and nationality; open review names both; post-publication review lets comment continue after the paper appears. A journal that promises publication in three days without review is, by that fact alone, not doing peer review.

Citation metrics and publishing identifiers
Term	What it measures or identifies	Point to remember
Impact factor	A journal-level measure: citations received in the current year to the articles the journal published in the previous two years, divided by the number of citable items in those two years.	Devised by Eugene Garfield; published in the Journal Citation Reports. It rates a journal, never an individual author.
h-index	An author-level measure: the largest number h such that the scholar has h papers each cited at least h times.	Proposed by physicist Jorge Hirsch (2005). Balances quantity against influence; can never fall.
i10-index	The number of a scholar’s publications that have received at least ten citations each.	A Google Scholar metric; the simplest of the author metrics to compute.
Citation index / database	A database that records which paper cites which, so influence can be traced forward in time.	Science Citation Index (Garfield), Web of Science (Clarivate), Scopus (Elsevier), Google Scholar.
ISSN	International Standard Serial Number — an eight-digit code identifying a serial publication: a journal, magazine or newspaper.	Belongs to the title as a whole, not to any one issue. Print and online versions get different numbers.
ISBN	International Standard Book Number — a thirteen-digit code (ten digits before 2007) identifying one edition of one book.	Book equals ISBN, journal equals ISSN. A new edition needs a new ISBN.
DOI	Digital Object Identifier — a permanent alphanumeric name for one article, dataset or chapter, in the form prefix slash suffix.	Solves the problem of dead links: the DOI stays fixed even when the web address changes.
Open access	Free online availability of research to any reader.	Gold (the publisher makes it free, often for an article processing charge), Green (the author self-archives in a repository), Diamond (free to read and free to publish), Hybrid.
Predatory journal	A journal that charges a fee and publishes with little or no genuine peer review.	Warning signs: spam invitations, promise of publication in days, fake or padded editorial board, hidden charges, an impact factor claimed from an unknown agency. The term was popularised by librarian Jeffrey Beall.
UGC-CARE list	A reference list of quality journals maintained by UGC through its Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics, created so that work in dubious journals would not count for academic credit.	Know what it was for — the anti-predatory-journal purpose is what the exam asks. UGC announced the discontinuation of the list in 2024, leaving quality assessment to institutions.

⚠️ Journal metric versus author metric

The impact factor belongs to a journal; the h-index and i10-index belong to a person. Saying "his impact factor is 4.2" is a category mistake and options phrased that way are wrong. Also note the two-year window in the impact factor — a five-year variant exists but the standard definition uses the previous two years. And a high impact factor never certifies a single article: the distribution of citations inside a journal is extremely skewed, which is exactly why author-level metrics were invented.

Plagiarism and the UGC Academic Integrity Approach

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s words, ideas, data, images or code as your own, whether deliberately or through carelessness. Intention is not part of the definition — "I forgot to cite it" is an explanation, not a defence. The remedy is equally simple: quote, cite, and let the reader see the seam between your voice and the source.

Verbatim or copy-paste plagiarism — lifting text word for word without quotation marks and citation. The commonest and easiest to detect.
Mosaic or patchwork plagiarism — stitching phrases from several sources together and changing a few words, so that no sentence is fully copied yet nothing is original.
Paraphrasing without attribution — restating another’s argument in your own words but not naming him. Rewriting does not transfer ownership of an idea.
Self-plagiarism (recycling) — reusing substantial parts of your own already published work without disclosure. Related malpractices are duplicate submission of the same paper to two journals and salami slicing, cutting one study into several thin papers to inflate a publication count.
Source-based plagiarism — citing a source you never read, citing a secondary source as if it were primary, or inventing a citation altogether. Accidental plagiarism covers missing quotation marks and mangled references; it is still a violation, only a less culpable one.

UGC addressed the problem through the UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018. Two features of that scheme are regularly examined. First, penalties are graded by the percentage of similarity, so the response to a small overlap is not the same as the response to wholesale copying. Second, certain matter is excluded from the similarity count: all quoted work reproduced with permission and proper attribution, the references, bibliography and table of contents, and small similitudes of up to fourteen consecutive words as well as generic terms, laws and standard symbols and equations. The scheme also asks institutions to constitute a Departmental Academic Integrity Panel and an Institutional Academic Integrity Panel to examine cases, and to teach research ethics at induction.

Similarity-based penalty tiers under the UGC 2018 Regulations (for a student’s thesis or dissertation)
Level	Similarity found	Consequence for the student
Level 0	Up to 10 per cent	No penalty. Some overlap of standard phrasing is unavoidable in academic writing.
Level 1	Above 10 and up to 40 per cent	No marks or credit; the student is asked to submit a revised script within a stipulated period.
Level 2	Above 40 and up to 60 per cent	Debarred from submitting a revised script for one year.
Level 3	Above 60 per cent	Registration for the programme is cancelled.

ℹ️ Detection is a tool, not a verdict

Similarity-detection software — Urkund/Ouriginal, Turnitin, iThenticate, DrillBit, Plagiarism Checker X and others — reports a similarity index, not a plagiarism verdict. A correctly quoted and cited passage raises the index without being plagiarism, while a stolen idea expressed in fresh words may not raise it at all. That is why a human panel, not the number, decides the case. Under the ministry-supported Shodh Shuddhi initiative, INFLIBNET provides plagiarism-detection software to universities, and every submitted thesis is deposited in Shodhganga so that later work can be checked against it.

Research Ethics: Participants, Data and Authorship

Ethics in research has two faces. Towards participants the duty is to protect people who have agreed to be studied; towards the discipline the duty is to keep the record of knowledge honest. Modern codes descend from the Nuremberg Code (1947) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which established that voluntary consent and the welfare of the subject outrank the value of the data.

Informed consent — the participant must be told the purpose, procedure, duration, risks and benefits in a language he understands, and must agree freely. Consent is only valid if the person is competent to give it, which is why studies with children need parental consent plus the child’s own assent.
Voluntary participation and the right to withdraw — no coercion, no pressure from a teacher or employer, no penalty for saying no, and the freedom to leave at any point without giving a reason and without losing any benefit already promised.
Anonymity versus confidentiality — under anonymity the researcher himself cannot connect a response to a person, because no identifying information was ever collected. Under confidentiality he can, but undertakes not to disclose it and stores the link securely. An interview study can offer confidentiality but never true anonymity, and the exam has tested exactly this distinction.
Non-maleficence and beneficence — minimise physical, psychological, social and legal harm; do not deceive unless there is no alternative, and then debrief afterwards. Sensitive research usually requires prior clearance from an institutional ethics committee.
The FFP triad — Fabrication is inventing data or results that were never obtained; Falsification is manipulating real data, equipment or images, or omitting inconvenient observations so the record no longer matches the research; Plagiarism is appropriating another’s work. These three are treated internationally as the core forms of research misconduct, distinct from the milder "questionable research practices" such as salami slicing or selective reporting.
Authorship and conflict of interest — authorship must reflect real intellectual contribution: gift authorship (adding a senior who did nothing), ghost authorship (omitting someone who did the work) and guest authorship are all unethical. Every author should be able to defend the paper. Any financial or personal interest that could bias the work — funding from an interested company, a family connection — must be disclosed, not merely avoided.

💡 Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism — three different thefts

Picture a shop. Fabrication is writing a sale in the register that never happened — the entry is fiction from the start. Falsification is rubbing out three real sales that spoil the month’s trend, or nudging the figures up: the transactions existed, the record has been bent. Plagiarism is copying the neighbour’s register and signing your name on it. Fabrication invents, falsification distorts, plagiarism steals. The exam gives you a one-line situation and expects the right label, so fix the verbs: invent, distort, steal.

Application of ICT in Research

ICT has changed every stage of research, and the syllabus expects you to name the tool that belongs to each stage. For searching, there are databases and repositories; for managing what you find, reference managers; for collecting data, online forms; for analysing it, statistical and qualitative packages; and for checking and disseminating, similarity software and open repositories. Keep the mapping tidy — questions usually ask "which of the following is used for X".

Reference managers — Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, JabRef. They store references, insert in-text citations in a chosen style, and rebuild the whole reference list when you switch from APA to MLA. They are for citation management, not for statistical analysis.
Statistical and analysis packages — SPSS, R, SAS, STATA, PSPP and spreadsheets for quantitative work; NVivo and ATLAS.ti for coding interview transcripts and other qualitative data. R and PSPP are free and open source, which matters for a scholar without a licence budget.
Indian repositories and consortia — Shodhganga, the INFLIBNET repository of Indian electronic theses and dissertations; Shodhgangotri, which holds the synopses of newly registered research topics; e-ShodhSindhu, the consortium that gives universities access to subscribed e-journals and e-books; INFLIBNET itself, the Information and Library Network Centre at Ahmedabad, an inter-university centre of the UGC; and Vidwan and IRINS, which profile Indian researchers and their output.
e-content platforms — e-PG Pathshala, the UGC initiative offering postgraduate-level e-content across disciplines; the National Digital Library of India, a single-window digital library coordinated by IIT Kharagpur; SWAYAM for MOOCs and SWAYAM Prabha for educational DTH channels; and NPTEL for engineering and science lectures. All grew under the National Mission on Education through ICT.
Online surveys and collaboration — Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, LimeSurvey, Kobo Toolbox collect responses directly into a spreadsheet, removing manual data entry and its errors; cloud storage and version control protect against the lost-laptop disaster. But an online survey silently restricts your sample to people with connectivity and literacy, which is a coverage bias you must report in your limitations.

🎯 Why the syllabus bothers with tool names

NET is a teacher eligibility test, and a teacher who supervises research must be able to point a student to the right resource. That is why the paper asks factual items such as which repository holds Indian theses, which body runs INFLIBNET, or which software manages citations. Prepare these as name-to-function pairs, one line each. And note the pattern in the Indian names: Shodh means research, so Shodhganga stores completed theses, Shodhgangotri their synopses at the source, and Shodh Shuddhi cleans plagiarism — the family name tells you the family business.

Key takeaways

A thesis has preliminaries (title page, certificates, contents, abstract), a main body of five typical chapters (introduction, review, methodology, analysis, conclusion) and end matter (bibliography, appendices). The abstract is written last but placed in the preliminaries.
By Indian convention a thesis is for the PhD and a dissertation for the Master’s or MPhil. A monograph is a book-length study of one narrow subject; a review article synthesises published work and produces no new primary data.
Seminar = paper presented and discussed; symposium = one topic, several experts, less interaction; workshop = hands-on skill building; colloquium = invited speaker questioned by the audience; panel discussion = moderator plus panellists debating; conference = largest and most formal; webinar = any of these held online.
APA and Harvard are author-date, MLA is author-page with a "Works Cited" list, Chicago offers notes-bibliography or author-date, and IEEE and Vancouver are numeric. A reference list holds only cited works; a bibliography holds everything consulted.
Impact factor rates a journal using citations in the current year to articles of the previous two years; h-index and i10-index rate an author (i10 counts papers with at least ten citations and is a Google Scholar metric). Never attach an impact factor to a person.
ISSN (eight digits) is for serials, ISBN (thirteen digits) for a book edition, DOI is a permanent identifier for one article. Predatory journals charge fees and skip genuine peer review; the UGC-CARE list existed to steer scholars away from them.
Under the UGC Regulations, 2018, similarity up to 10 per cent attracts no penalty, and quoted matter with attribution, references, bibliography and small standard similitudes are excluded from the count. Higher tiers require a revised script, then debarment, then cancellation of registration.
Research ethics towards participants means informed consent, voluntary participation with the right to withdraw, and confidentiality or anonymity; towards the discipline it means avoiding the FFP triad — fabrication invents data, falsification distorts it, plagiarism steals it — plus honest authorship and disclosed conflicts of interest.
Map ICT tools to stages: Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote manage references; SPSS, R and STATA analyse quantitative data while NVivo handles qualitative; Shodhganga stores Indian theses, Shodhgangotri their synopses, e-PG Pathshala offers postgraduate e-content, and the National Digital Library aggregates learning resources.

Practice questions (8)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

Which academic event is essentially hands-on, in which the participants themselves practise a skill under a resource person and the outcome is a competence or a product rather than a paper?
1. Seminar
2. Symposium
3. Workshop
4. Colloquium
Show answer
Answer: C — Workshop
A workshop is the only one of these formats built around doing rather than saying: a small group practises a skill and leaves with a product such as a question bank or a lesson plan. A seminar centres on a paper that is presented and then critically discussed. A symposium has several experts speaking briefly on different aspects of one topic, with limited audience interaction. A colloquium is an informal departmental meeting where an invited speaker addresses the group and is then questioned by it.
The i10-index, defined as the number of a scholar’s publications with at least ten citations each, is a metric provided by:
1. Scopus
2. Google Scholar
3. Web of Science
4. Journal Citation Reports
Show answer
Answer: B — Google Scholar
The i10-index is a Google Scholar metric and appears on a scholar’s Google Scholar profile alongside the h-index and total citations. Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database and Web of Science is Clarivate’s; both report citation counts and author metrics, but the i10-index is specifically a Google Scholar creation. The Journal Citation Reports is where the journal impact factor is published, which is a journal-level rather than an author-level measure.
Which statement correctly distinguishes a reference list from a bibliography?
1. A reference list contains only the works actually cited in the text, while a bibliography lists all works consulted, whether cited or not.
2. A bibliography contains only the works actually cited, while a reference list includes all background reading.
3. A reference list is arranged chronologically and a bibliography alphabetically.
4. The two terms are interchangeable and differ only in the discipline that uses them.
Show answer
Answer: A — A reference list contains only the works actually cited in the text, while a bibliography lists all works consulted, whether cited or not.
A reference list must correspond exactly to the in-text citations: every entry has a citation and every citation has an entry. A bibliography is broader, since it records everything the researcher consulted and may even add recommended reading, so it can be longer than the reference list but never shorter. Arrangement does not distinguish them — both are normally alphabetical by author surname, except in numeric styles such as IEEE where the list follows the order of first citation.
Under the UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018, a similarity of up to 10 per cent in a student’s thesis falls in which level?
1. Level 3 — registration for the programme is cancelled
2. Level 2 — debarred from submitting a revised script for one year
3. Level 1 — a revised script must be submitted within a stipulated period
4. Level 0 — no penalty
Show answer
Answer: D — Level 0 — no penalty
The Regulations grade the response to the percentage of similarity. Up to 10 per cent is Level 0 and carries no penalty, because a certain overlap of standard academic phrasing is unavoidable. Above 10 and up to 40 per cent is Level 1, where a revised script is required; above 40 and up to 60 per cent is Level 2, with debarment from resubmission for one year; and above 60 per cent is Level 3, where registration is cancelled. Quoted matter reproduced with permission and attribution, references, bibliography and small standard similitudes are excluded from the similarity count altogether.
A university department launches a new quarterly research journal. The identifier it must obtain for the journal is:
1. ISBN
2. ISSN
3. DOI
4. ORCID
Show answer
Answer: B — ISSN
A journal is a serial publication, and serials are identified by the eight-digit International Standard Serial Number, which belongs to the title as a whole rather than to any single issue. An ISBN, of thirteen digits, identifies one edition of one book, so it would be wrong for a journal though right for a monograph or an edited volume. A DOI is a permanent identifier for an individual item such as an article or chapter, not for the journal itself, and ORCID identifies a researcher rather than a publication.
The journal impact factor for a given year is computed from citations received in that year to the articles the journal published in the:
1. Same year only
2. Previous one year
3. Previous two years
4. Entire history of the journal
Show answer
Answer: C — Previous two years
The standard journal impact factor devised by Eugene Garfield divides the citations received in the current year by the number of citable items the journal published in the two preceding years. A five-year variant also exists, but the classical definition uses a two-year window, which is why fast-moving fields tend to show higher factors than slow-citing ones. Remember also that the impact factor evaluates a journal and can never be attributed to an individual author.
Which of the following is the national repository of electronic theses and dissertations submitted to Indian universities, maintained by INFLIBNET?
1. e-PG Pathshala
2. SWAYAM
3. National Digital Library of India
4. Shodhganga
Show answer
Answer: D — Shodhganga
Shodhganga is the INFLIBNET repository in which Indian universities deposit the full text of submitted theses and dissertations, so that research is visible and later work can be checked against it. Its companion Shodhgangotri holds the synopses of newly registered research topics. e-PG Pathshala is a UGC platform of postgraduate-level e-content, SWAYAM hosts MOOCs, and the National Digital Library of India is a single-window aggregator of learning resources coordinated by IIT Kharagpur — none of them is a theses repository.
A researcher reports readings for twenty samples although he actually tested only twelve, inventing the remaining eight. This form of research misconduct is called:
1. Fabrication
2. Falsification
3. Plagiarism
4. Salami slicing
Show answer
Answer: A — Fabrication
Fabrication means making up data or results that were never obtained, which is exactly what inventing eight readings is. Falsification is different: there the data is real but has been manipulated, images altered, or inconvenient observations quietly dropped so that the record no longer matches what was actually done. Plagiarism is appropriating another person’s words, ideas or data. Salami slicing is cutting one study into several thin publications to inflate a count, which is a questionable practice rather than one of the three core forms of misconduct in the FFP triad.