Fundamentals of Scientific Research
750791
Dr. Samer Odeh Hanna (Ph.D.)www.philadelphia.edu.jo/academics/shanna
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Introduction
• About the Lecturer
• About the Students
• About the Course
• Syllabus
• Student’s main duties
• Marks
Based on a lecture given at University of Cambridge for the Research Skills Module (Mphil)
Reading Research Papers
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Research paper
• What is a research paper?
• Have you ever read a research paper?
• Have you ever write a research paper?
• Is it easy to read or write a research paper?
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Scientific Method
• Observing things
• Formulate a hypothesis (very specific question)
• Perform Experiments
• Analysis
• Conclusion
But
• Experiments my lead us to an unexpected results that may lead to requiring new observations….(cycle of science)
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Research question
Example research question:
• How can I improve transmission latency across the Internet
Hypothesis would be:
• If I implement protocol X it will improve the latency among two nodes
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Research Process
• Understand other people’s research by reading there papers
• As you do research you understand thing you didn’t know.
• You discover that you must read about new things.
• As you understand their work you know what you do.
• When you start writing a research you might discovered that your work has been done by someone else.
• Other people build on each other work.
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How to get started
• How do we find the right paper
• Most of your study has been on textbooks (memorizing)
• We were always told to believe what's in the books
• NOW, we are grown up and what we need to find is not in textbooks!
• Papers are the source
• Papers are Not textbooks (treat them differently)
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Can we say that “all the papers are good?”
• No
• Papers my provide a poor research.
• Use your brain to judge if a paper has a poor research.
• People do bad research by trying to prove something useless
• There are pressure to publish (for promotion etc.)
• Ask yourself if the research your are reading is good and correct.
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How do we know if a paper is helpful to our research
• Thousands of papers are published everyday
• Only you can know that papers that are addressing your research question
• For the less important papers only skimming is enough
• You don't have to understand everything in a paper
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Can we say that “all papers are well written?”
• No
• Many papers are difficult to be understood (either badly written or we do not have the knowledge)
• Apply critical judgment on a paper.
• You don’t need to understand everything in a paper but only the important stuff.
• This course will teach you how to write an understandable, well written paper (next lecture)
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How to pick the right paper to read?• What questions to ask about a paper on hand:
1- Do I need to read this paper (Is it important for my research?)
2- What are they actually trying to find out?
3- Why is this important?
4- What did they actually measured?
5- What theorem they are trying to prove?
6- What where the results?
7- What did they conclude?
8- How they concluded it?
9- Do you believe them?
Exercise 1
• Read the following paper:
Li, N., Xie, T., Jin, M. & Liy, C. (2010). Perturbation-based user-input-validation testing of web applications, The Journal of Systems and Software 83(2010), pp. 2263-2274.
And then write and present a summary about answering the questions in the slide 12.
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Questions?
• Wishing you a happy Eid