Workable Research Guidelines to The Beginners
Updated: Sep 28, 2020
"Here we have listed a few practical information acquired from our experiences. These guidelines can be accompanied by any beginner research enthusiast when they do not find suitable guides and independently start working on a research project."
"It's not an article, It's a complete guideline, so better to read step by step, and practice in your research routine"
Finding out the area of interest
Minimum, you must know the track. [Ex. – Physics, Chemistry or any Branch of Engineering, etc.]
Visit the website of the most established lab in the world in your field. You may refer to top institutions and their research impacts. The peak of an area or point where the scientific world is working will be known after doing this.
After reviewing the lab's and institution's websites, go a little bit in-depth and find out the people working in that area. Finalize about 10-15 scientists and researchers, find out their recent publication from ResearchGate, google scholar, or arxiv profile.
From their profile, you may just read the title of the paper or maximum the abstract of the publication; this will give more details about your area of interest. Ultimately, the construction of random ideas will begin in mind.
Once you realize the topic, now go for composing a doable problem. Work for framing a project statement and brief abstract, including research done till now, and the gap or problem you found after doing a literature survey. According to available resources include computational and experimental work.
In the next step, favor finding out researchers in your country and near the institutions, prepare a list of professors, and contact details as it can be used to secure the internship and research project in the future.
Reviewing Literatures
Following a few points, you may consider during the literature survey.
First, what source you are using, finalize useful journals to find out the research papers in the topic and problem you are supposed to work.
You may also do the different google search, and by reading the title only, decide whether you want to open this link.
In the research paper, discussed literature pieces should converge to the gap; in the manuscript, one cannot discuss some papers randomly without any conclusion. So better to focus on the papers which are relevant to the problem only.
By doing this review work, you can also figure out the gaps in the theories, computational works, and experimental works. It will help in writing the new problem, in case you are not satisfied with the previous one.
In the whole of this process, try to build links in the previous work done by others. You will get the reason behind the work done. Moreover, you will find out how the respective theory, invention, or experiment looked like in the initial phase and how many scientists helped in shaping the final product.
Start developing the problem and finding a solvable approach.
Now you know the area of interest, the point where the scientific world is working, the problem you want to work on, the gaps in the available literature, and the process followed by others.
What next? The research can be done in three ways, first abstract core theoretical and mathematical work, second computational work, and third experimental analysis. Remember these all three are equally responsible for developing the final product.
In theoretical research, researchers work on some hypotheses and construct some ideological chain and try to prove it by available mathematical tools. If mathematics is not available, they give their formulations and predict some parameters based on their assumption made. Theoretical work is not always an easy task, as the name looks like.
The last point was about abstract theoretical work, in the same what a general student can do? One can prefer to work on reviewing the theories and suggest his/her point of view or can recommend a few things. It is not easy that much as it sounds like. Even Einstein invested much time in understanding the mathematics and deriving new formulas.
Next is the computational work. We are sure enough that one can do this easily. Why? Because of the availability of open-source software and, of course, you can get a good laptop or, if you are in an institution, approach the department's head to provide a system.
In the computational work also, there are multiple difficulty levels according to the ambitions. Depending upon what exactly you are looking for. Are you just looking to use available software or want to develop? Any experimental system is first designed and simulated in the computer only, and they decide the parameter's value, which is the key to develop the experimental setups. Ex, at CERN, firstly, theorists predict that there is some particle of X energy and Y mass, and if this can be proved, we can explain our universe in a more detailed way. Secondly, computational physicists come into the picture and decide whether we can build such experiments or work to find out the practical information by numerical analysis using formulated theories by the theorist. Next, if computational results are desirable, they go for designing and building the experimental prototype.
If you are doing computational research, you also must feel proud as you save money and time. Furthermore, as I said, this is also having multiple levels so that you can choose wisely according to the academic level. You can start this from the undergraduate itself without taking off much help from others by following the points mentioned earlier.
Next comes experimental research, but there is some limitation of resources and funding in the early research phase, mostly in the developing countries. However, you can always join the institute's running projects or as an intern at another institute.
Interpreting Data
In all research filed and processes, most of the time, you collect the data. So, research is somehow collecting the data and later on the interoperation of the same.
Again, the quality of the interpreting skills of the data will come during the process and the knowledge you acquired, so keep working on the field's basics. Sometimes you may have useful data but do not know how to understand its physical meaning; then, there is no meaning of such exercises.
Note - All the above-mentioned points are indigenous and fully experimented. This is what we recommend to any student willing to do a research project in his/her early career.
Hopefully, after some time, you may wish to write a project proposal or a short introductory report for applying a position/conference or higher study. So, for the same, we have pointed out only a few points. In the next article, we will describe a complete early guide for writing a research paper.
Here we have something for you, If you want to setup Bose .X-like research platform at your institution, write a mail to us or fill out the contact form indicating the same.
Some Key Points to Consider During Writing the Extended Abstract of Project
Introduction - The introduction describes what is already known about the research topic and the currently unanswered questions in the field or future development.
Methods - Your to-do list in detail, the experiments/computational approach you are proposing, or the planning observations. In computational projects, briefly describe the computational need, suitable software, programming language, and theoretical background.
Predicted Results – From the project, what type of results are you expecting? How it is going to be significant in the respective field. Analyze the novelty and originality of the work.
Relevance - Elaborate on how the project will advance the knowledge base in the scientific/technical field you chose. Explain what more significant impact (if any) your project might provide for other areas of science, humanity, and the environment. Explore any practical applications that might arise from the research. Because the next era will be more propitious if we work for research innovations and commercialization at parallel
Bibliography
"Narrow Down Your Idea to a Testable Question and Hypothesis".
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_by Ankul Prajapati, Contact - LinkedIn, or ResearchGate.