In this exclusive series, we talk to forward-thinking academics who have strategically leveraged the power of AI to transform their life. Today, we ask Choongo Mulungu, a PhD candidate and active member of the growing researcher community in Zambia, how he supercharged his research journey with AI. We dive into Mulungu’s experience with three AI solutions, available with the one-of-a-kind Researcher.Life All Access subscription, and how they’ve become the secret sauce in his recipe for success.
About Choongo Mulungu
Choongo Mulungu is a PhD candidate of Health and Medical Psychology at the University of Lusaka in Zambia. He is a licensed Professional Counsellor with the Zambia Counselling Council and has more than five years of experience in health, lecturing, project management, and community mobilization. As a founder of the Conquerous Institute, he also works at the Ministry of Health of Zambia as a Mental Health Coordinator.
Mulungu recently came across Researcher.Life, and after experiencing its many benefits, has now signed up to be a Researcher.Life Ambassador, spreading the word about AI tools and solutions that are created for researchers, by researchers. In this interview, he explains how he harnessed the power of AI to make his research work more efficient, save valuable time, and move closer to his goals.
How has Researcher.Life All Access helped simplify your work?
The Researcher.Life All Access subscription gives me access to more advanced AI tools for research, thereby making the research work less stressful and more enjoyable. I enjoy some of the AI-powered products, like Paperpal, which delivers language suggestions and confirms my thinking by instantly evaluating what I type in for quality and appropriateness. Learning is a process and in psychology, we believe in repetition; when we repeat things, we reinforce the knowledge we have. So Paperpal’s recommendations and suggestions have helped reinforce the knowledge that I have about research writing and the entire research process.
Another benefit is R Upskill’s set of courses for researchers, which provide very useful insights into a number of research aspects that most of us, as researchers, start to take for granted as we gain more experience in research. Then there are research studies that can sometimes cut across subject areas, making it difficult to find appropriate journals to publish in. Here I find the Global Journal Database, another AI tool that comes with the Researcher.Life All Access subscription, very handy in easing my life. Overall, I can confidently say Researcher.Life has helped to simplify my work and raise my status as a researcher.
What do you like about Paperpal and how has it helped you?
I never imagined that I could go to Microsoft Word and find something that aids my writing process, but then came Paperpal. Once I got Paperpal for Word, my daily writing has been much easier. Now, whenever I am typing something or putting down my thoughts, Paperpal is able to work with me. It’s like having an extra brain just to help me bring out my ideas and findings in a way that is current and appropriate as per academic writing conventions. Paperpal is always there for me, making relevant suggestions to improve my work as I write. It helps us researchers so much because the suggestions are tailored for academic writing, which helps polish sentences in a way that they are contextually appropriate and in line with how other researchers would write specific phrases in their own work. So, Paperpal helps me create more elegant research content that highlights my thoughts and ideas perfectly.
How have you benefitted from researcher courses on R Upskill?
You know, research is a skill and if you’re not going to practice them, then your skills become dead. Attending some relevant courses that improve a researcher’s skills are just what you need if you want to stay relevant. R Upskill is great because it presents us with a lot of options in terms of recent information and important guidance from experts. There are a lot of experienced scholars that share information on how to go about managing different parts of the research process. This helps you gain key skills and sometimes you get to improve your practice based on these new researcher skills. Sometimes we take things for granted. We want to do things the same way we used to when we did our research methodology in school. Here, R Upskill keeps on enhancing our skills. I think that’s why it’s rightly called R Upskill because it hones our researcher skills so we can further improve the research process. I enjoy and find myself going back to R Upskill repeatedly because I want to be a up-to-date researcher who is able to bring out my research in the best way with the most current researcher skills.
Every researcher out there wants to upgrade their skills. And when you’re out of school, you don’t have as many platforms to support you, maybe a few conferences that you attend here and there to gain knowledge. But having an all-in-one package that provides you with skills that are current on the market is just the way to go. It’s what I find most interesting about R Upskill.
What did you find most useful about the Global Journal Database?
Once you are done with your studies, with your research, you would want to ensure that you publish your paper in a journal that is reputable and will help you reach your target audience. But you know, some of our professions have a wider coverage, so the research we do cuts across subject areas and sometimes you may not know what would be the most appropriate genre to submit your paper to. Then this solution popped up on my screen, it was the Global Journal Database by Researcher.Life. It helped me find a reputable journal for my research by suggesting a list of most relevant journals that could help me reach the best target audience for my study. From this, I could choose the journal that is the best for me. With this Global Journal Database, I found that you don’t have to stress so much and can just go about enjoying the research process.
The Researcher.Life All Access subscription gives you access to this easy-to-use platform with key details on a wide range of reputable journals, which helps you quickly find the journal that works best for your study. Having these recommendations with information about each journal just removes the stress of having to find journals and then check if they fit your needs. Often journals reject your paper and say, ‘I don’t think it fits our scope of articles,’ but with this journal finder tool I find this risk is much lower; there are hardly any chances that your paper will be rejected because it doesn’t meet the scope. After working hard to create a powerful paper, I no longer have to worry about figuring out where do I publish my work? The Global Journal Database is the one-stop solution to help me, and all researchers actually, find the best journal to publish in.
Researcher.Life is a subscription-based platform that unifies top AI tools and services designed to speed up, simplify, and streamline a researcher’s journey, from reading to writing, submission, promotion and more. Based on over 20 years of experience in academia, Researcher.Life empowers researchers to put their best research forward and move closer to success.
Try for free or sign up for the Researcher.Life All Access Pack, a one-of-a-kind subscription that unlocks full access to an AI academic writing assistant, literature reading app, journal finder, scientific illustration tool, and exclusive discounts on professional services from Editage. Find the best AI tools a researcher needs, all in one place – Get All Access now at just $25 a month or $199 for a year!
