When
you have your first research work and experience you face a lot of challenges.
The main reason for this is that these things are usually not taught in
universities research methodology courses neither your supervisor can help you
in these things. Supervisor can only motivate you, guide you when you stuck and
can check the originality and quality of your contents.
So,
the first critical phase in your research is topic selection and proposal
writing. Always try to choose a topic of your interest, that you think you will
feel fine with this and will enjoy your research.
Before
you choose any topic and write a proposal you must have background knowledge
and have studied some prior literature. At the start you need to study at-least
10 to 15 papers for your proposal writing, topic selection and background
knowledge. You can also consult books for background knowledge. After studying
this do a critical Analysis of that, this will give you insights to the main
issues of the area. Now choose an area for your prospective research. Based on
this study you can now write a proposal. This may be called narrow downing your
research.
Now
start studying state of the art literature, which is most related to your area
and topic.
Mostly
initial researchers also face problems in writing other chapters and sections
of their report, such as introduction, Methodology, validation, results and
discussion etc. During my MS our research methodology teacher told us about “free
writing’ which is very important especially for beginners. Just write down
whatever you have in your mind, it may be scattered but combing, integrating and
relating is not a big issue. So, free writing, boldness and confidence are the
notable factors. Several times a person have very good ideas but they cannot
document it accordingly.
A
tactic which I personally use for this is that I do write all the sections like
Abstract, Introduction, Literature Review, and so on. Now as I told earlier
that during proposal writing you must have to study some prior research work,
so, basically that is the start of your Literature review. Note it down in your
literature review section.
At
this moment keep in mind that each university has their own rules and standards
for research. Like we had two research modules Independent study (IS) 1 and 2.
During the course of IS-1 we have to study 15 papers (not older than 5 years)
and have to write a summary, findings and limitations of each paper. We have to
submit two reports from them a long in APA writing style and a short in IEEE
format. Then in IS-2 we were bound to present something new. It may be a model,
a framework or a tool properly following a research methodology, followed by
validation, showing the results to claim the significance of contribution.
According
to my opinion literature acts as a king for the entire research, because when
you work on your research project, you will have to consult literature for many
things and questions that arise in your mind, such as writing proposal, topic
selection, introduction writing, methodology, validation etc. so whenever and
wherever you stuck consult literature to know about how and what others have
done. You will definitely find an answer.
Thanks.
Good Luck…
