Research Methods¶
Know how to do research is a key ability in today’s society because our society are becoming more and more sophisticated, tons of information are generated every second, so how can we find the information that we need in order to do the things we want? We need the ability to do independnet research, and that is the goal for our graduate education.
I’m a PostDoc right now, that means I’m still doing research after my PhD time, and I love doing research, to figure out new concepts, methods, ideas. But research is not easy, it is messy, it needs attention and dedication to it. Also it needs guidance along the way. Usually what we are taught in school is the knowledge itself, but how to discover new knowledge, how to organize the knowledge into a textbook (or scientific publication), these information are still missing. So I want to summarize them in my own perspective in this article. I will share with you my advices on different topics (how to do literature review, how to write the background summary for a certain project, how to organize information during the research process, how to write research reports and research diaries, etc.) I hope this article will help you along the way. Although research is a lot of fun, it is still a demanding job.
Just a reminder to myself: Write as clear as possible, and be actionable, otherwise there are too many articles online about these topics, and there will be no contribution from me. I need this article to have my own voice.
The order of the following topics are in the same order as doing research, although in real life, the order may change due to circumastances, the general execution procedure for each step remains the same. All you need to do is just adapting these principles to your own work.
How to do literature review¶
The topics (or projects) in our research usually come from these sources:
Our own curiosity (the questions that we want to know the answer)
From our supervisor or boss
Generated during research process (reading papers & doing research)
Hear from colleagues or a conference (learn from others)
But only having a topic is not enough to go on research, we need to make sure two things: (1) what specific question are we going to tackle in this project? (Be specific) (2) How do we know that this is important? In order to answer both questions, we need references, and the references we talk here, are published literatures. We can only answer both questions by extensive reading and critical thinking, this is called “literature review” process.
So the purpose of literature review is multi-faced:
Learn what have already been done
Place our work among other works, know the importance and novelty of our work (based on others’ works)
Learn the methodologies that have been tested and examined in the past, their advantages and disadvantages, the origin of the errors, and what needs to be improved.
Create a background knowledge base for our future writing process (e.g. introduction, or the discussion section)
Now we know the importance of literature review, let’s learn how to do it efficiently and effectively.
For efficiency, we want to gain most knowledge by reading less papers. For effectiveness, we want to read the papers that are directly connected to our work. And we want to make sure that we have organized all possible ways for solving our problems, and analyze the advantages and disadvantages for each method.