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