Inpra – an intelligent system for writing while doing research

Abstract

Research students have difficulty following at least some steps in research methodology. Nowadays, computing technology has made it easy for researchers to execute the steps with the support of software tools. Although many research students gradually manage to conduct the research, some find it challenging to write the thesis in time. This issue stems from separating the conduct of research from writing the thesis. This paper presents the extension to our Intelligent Personal Research Assistant, InPRA, to enable a researcher to write the thesis incrementally while doing the research. Here, we have introduced an intelligent writing template, which guides the writing process differently from the order of chapters of the thesis. The intelligent template is also integrated with tools such as Zotero, MS Word, and Grammarly software. The incremental writing process enables the generation of research proposals, progress reports, conference papers, theses, and journal papers. The writing extension to InPRA has been evaluated with research students at the postgraduate level.