What Would You Recommend Me For A One Year Project: Develop A Bioinformatics Software Or Aim For A Research Paper???
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12.6 years ago
Lilimoon ▴ 70

please help me to determine which is the best to do it during two semester as bioinformatics project application software or research paper???

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Welcome to BioStar, please bear in mind that the users of this forum are not here to do your work for you. And if you're looking for the easiest path, I would suggest you have picked the wrong vocation. I'm not going to close it immediately, but this question needs some serious thought and reworking.

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Depends on your background, depends on your interests, depends on your supervisor (and cynically, depends on who is likely to be marking you). Edit your question and give us a bit more info. Also, software and papers aren't mutually exclusive.

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12.6 years ago

If you mean to say: "should I start developing applications or first learn how to solve real biological questions?"... Well, the answer will still depend on who you are and what you want to do in the end.

If you were already trained in software development and you do not know a lot about biology or the biological questions you might want to start by joining a team that works on application and work on development, meanwhile learning how people use that tool. In general in such a case do not make up the application idea yourself, as you will be most likely be "solving problems that nobody has". Alternatively even in that case you might just want to learn the needs by just trying to solve a problem.

If you were trained in biology... Well you could more or less turn this answer around. Just start from a problem, try what to really learn existing approaches. Meanwhile learn to use scripting tools (basic unix commands), query tools and programming languages to facilitate the ever existing in between problems. This site will provide you with many examples. Then when you stumble upon a problem that really needs to be solved try to find a team already working on solving that and try to join that team.

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12.6 years ago

ha! this is the story of my (research) life! personally I always aim first for an application software that solves a particular problem of great interest, I then test it as thoroughly as possible, and then I try publishing it.

as a personal advice, let me clarify that I always try to maintain enough discussions with my bio colleagues in order to detect and characterize the necessities at the very beginning, because there's no point building a tool that may not be useful even if you think it will be. plus it's always interesting to care about these relationships with the bio side of the lab, since their profiles are the ones that will enrich, test and ultimately use the software.

good luck!

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