If you have been reading this blog for some time then you know that I am a science graduate and as an undergraduate I did two research projects; a year long final year undergraduate research project and a mini research project. So I thought of giving an insight about how to conduct a research and some websites/tools that might be helpful to anyone who is looking forward to conduct a research.
So first things first. To do a research first you must have a research topic, aka the thing you are gonna do your research topic. Let me tell you something. The topic has to be very specific. If it is broad then you are in trouble. For an example if your research is about "The temperature variation of lakes in US" it is too broad. You have to pick a one lake of your interest or a one which is convenient so the topic will be "Temperature variation of xyz lake during abc time". And yes you have to specify a duration too. Otherwise you are in trouble.So how to come up with a topic. Usually in my university there are two methods. You either contact a supervisor and do one of their projects or coming up with one of your ideas. I did the latter. Now the next question. How to come up with a topic? Well for that you have to first pick a field of interest. In my case it was the chronic kidney disease. And then you have to read what other people have done already in this field. In other words we are going through existing knowledge that other people have gathered by their research. For this use Google Scholar. Type your topic of interest and thousands of journal articles will popup, but not everyone are free to read. You might find that some articles have to be purchased to read the whole article. Well in that case let me tell you a tip, students in third world countries use. Use sci hub. Go to sci hub website ( You will have to google it because they change their domain from time to time) and copy paste the journal article name or DOI. Voila... You can download the article. It is illegal but when your monthly income is 30 USD and you have to pay 60 to read one journal article people become desperate.(Also if you need any books you can find them on b-ok.org or pdfdrive.com) So now that you have a bunch of articles you are updated. Now brainstorm or you can use the future suggestions section in research articles. (If you want me to do a how to read a research paper simply comment below or email me: ruviperera780@gmail.com) There is a term called "research gap". It simply means the gap between existing work that has done on this topic and what others haven't done. That becomes our topic.
Now that we have a topic we have to write a proposal and do a proposal presentation to get the approval. Once we get the approval we can proceed to actually doing the research. Clinical research will need ethical clearance but the others are good to go. Next step is to develop the methodology. Here you have to be very careful. First of all you have to consider various factors that are affecting your experiment and those variables must remain constant throughout the experiments. After carefully considering practical as well as theoretical aspects you also have to consider statistics.Example: Deciding sample sized and appropriate data analysis methods. For this you can have the assistance of a statistician or you can simply do it by yourself.
In each and every step don't forget to contact your supervisors, get their assistance and keep them updated. Most important skill you need to have when doing research is time management. Trust me when doing a research time flies and you will be stressed/burned out easily. So make sure you don't keep everything until last minute ( speaking from experience here. I screwed.) and make sure to type chapters of your thesis along the way and send them to supervisors to check.
If you want to make me cover any tips/ topics as I mentioned earlier let me know. And you can expect my new articles every Mondays and Thursdays. Have a nice day y'all!
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