My Research Life

Inspiration

Usually students might think of research as a part of an assignment or a way to earn grades. But we think it is way more than that. We believe that doing personal research on topics that interest you is a great way to gain knowledge and promote education. And this education can be harvested in benefitting the society or the world as whole! Therefore, to give everyone across the world a quality research experience, we have designed My Research Life- a website that you can trust as a guide to reliable sources free of charge. This is our contribution towards helping everyone in this world gain knowledge in the topics they are interested in!

What it does

My Research Life can be viewed from two perspectives. One perspective is that it is an open source for anyone to research various topics. The keywords in the search will be used to guide the user to various trusted websites like Library of Congress, Britannica, etc. The search will be filtered based on most visited articles and readers' review ratings. This will guarantee a quality research to the users. Another perspective is that, this can be an assignment organizer for students. Teachers can assign students research assignments and students can then use our database (same platform where their work is assigned) without worrying about taking information from reliable websites to proceed with their research. This website has a feature of sending students a reminder before 12 hours before the due date. Another interesting feature is the "Citation Builder." This will help students build their citations after they use a particular source. This will help avoid plagiarism.

How we built it

We started with the idea about something so interesting as reading articles on your favorite topics to gain knowledge has become so difficult for students today. Therefore, we decided to make something that will bring the fun and encouragement back in the users. We started with the idea of a regular database, but then we realized our major users are going to be students. Therefore, we added features like personalized dashboard, assignment organizer, and citation builder.

Challenges we ran into

Our unique idea needed a unique name. Therefore, our biggest challenge for this project was to find a name for our website. We wanted the name to match the rich experience our website provides. So, we kept naming aside and finished the whole project. After we had a project that reflected all our ideas making this website unique, we cam up with the name "My Research Life" because we believe that research on various topics can truly shape someone's life in an extraordinary way!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the idea of using the same platform for two purposes. Organizing assignments and due dates and using it as a database for research (personalized or school). This helps the target audience extend from students only to all keen researchers!

What we learned

We learnt that just like physical products, online products also need promotion. Therefore, our project revolves mainly around how to get more people to know about My Research Life. We learnt how to breakdown a complex idea into sub-categories like, target audience, function, etc.

What's next for My Research Life

As My Research Life gets more attention, we would like to expand our list of sources. We will open doors to other reliable sources that are not very popular. We will include a registration process, where the resource registered will be assessed to check if it is truly reliable. If it is, then it will be included in our list and users will be able to access information from these new websites as well.