Research Methodology

Dheeraj Singh negi

03/10/2014

Introduction

Research is composed of two words “re” and “search”, which means to search again or it is a careful investigation to understand or re-examine the facts or to search for new facts or to modify older ones in any branch of knowledge. The term research is also used to describe an entire collection of information about a particular subject, but it is in general used by the students of higher schools.

Research in common parlance refers to search for knowledge; one can also define research as a scientific and systematic search for pertinent information on as specific topic. Some people consider research as a movement, a movement from the unknown to known. It is actually a voyage of discovery. Thus research is an endeavor to discover, develop and verify knowledge.

First things

Basic steps of a research project

Figuring out your study

Topic ideas

• E-book usage• Usability studies of

– Online tutorial(s)– ‘My Library” portals

• Analysis of library web sites or library instruction sites or pathfinders by best practices

• Student learning outcomes in LIS programs

Research areas library and information science

Analytical Bibliography

• Analytical bibliography is the study of physical characteristics of books, manuscripts, maps, and other written materials with the goal of shedding light on such matters as the authenticity of individual items and the chronology of different versions of particular works.– Though the techniques of analytical bibliography were largely

developed in order to study books and manuscripts of considerable age (e.g., early printings of Shakespeare's plays), the techniques are applicable to materials of more recent origin.

Contd………

• Physical characteristics that can be studied include:– Paper and ink chemistry– Watermarks– Collation– Binding– Typefaces, even down to the level of

individual distinctive pieces of type– Spelling variations

Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics

• First, a definition: "Bibliometrics is a type of research method used in library and information science. It utilizes quantitative analysis and statistics to describe patterns of publication within a given field or body of literature. Researchers may use bibliometric methods of evaluation to determine the influence of a single writer, for example, or to describe the relationship between two or more writers or works."

Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics

• Laws of Bibliometrics. One of the main areas in bibliometric research concerns the application of bibliometric laws. The three most commonly used laws in bibliometrics are: Lotka's law of scientific productivity, Bradford's law of scatter, and Zipf's law of word occurrence."

Contd….

• Lotka's Law. Named after Alfred J. Lotka, this law "describes the frequency of publication by authors in a given field." It states that in a given field the number of authors who make n contributions to the field is approximately 1/n2 of the number who make a single contribution, and that the typical proportion of those making just one contribution is about 60% of the authors in the field. "This means that out of all the authors in a given field, 60 percent will have just one publication . . . 15 percent will have two publications (1/22 times .60), 7 percent of authors will have three publications (1/32 times .60), and so on." It can be shown that only about 6% "of the authors in a field will produce more than 10 articles" apiece.

Contd…..

• Bradford's Law. Named after Samuel C. Bradford, a British librarian, "Bradford's Law serves as a general guideline to librarians in determining the number of core journals in any given field. It states that journals in a single field can be divided into three parts, each containing the same number of articles: 1) a core of journals on the subject, relatively few in number, that produces approximately one-third of all the articles, 2) a second zone, containing the same number of articles as the first, but a greater number of journals, and 3) a third zone, containing the same number of articles as the second, but a still greater number of journals. The mathematical relationship of the number of journals in the core to the first zone is a constant n and to the second zone the relationship is n². Bradford expressed this relationship as 1:n:n². Bradford formulated his law [in 1934] after studying a bibliography of geophysics. . . . Bradford's Law is not statistically accurate, strictly speaking. But it is still commonly used as a general rule of thumb."

Contd……

– Zipf's Law. Named after George K. Zipf, a Harvard professor of philology, this law describes the distribution of frequencies of words in ordinary prose:

• Suppose that you have a reasonably lengthy text, that you count the frequencies of the distinct words in the text, and that you then arrange the distinct words in decreasing order of frequency. Next, you assign rank 1 to the first word in the resulting list, i.e., the most frequent word; rank 2, to the next most frequent word; rank 3, to the third most frequent word; and so on.*

• Zipf's Law says that the product of the rank of a word in this list multiplied by its frequency will be approximately constant. That is, r x f = C, where r is the rank of a word, f is the frequency of the word, and C is a constant. (C will depend mainly on the size of the particular text you have counted, but certain other characteristics of the text also help to determine C.)

Contd……

• Another important area of bibliometrics, Citation Analysis, "uses various methods . . . in order to establish relationships between authors or their work. Here is a definition of citation analysis, and definitions of co-citation coupling and bibliographic coupling, which are specific kinds of citation analysis." – Citation Analysis. "When one author cites another author, a

relationship is established. Citation analysis uses citations in scholarly works to establish links. Many different links can be ascertained, such as links between authors, between scholarly works, between journals, between fields, or even between countries. Citations both from and to a certain document may be studied. One very common use of citation analysis is to determine the impact of a single author on a given field by counting the number of times the author has been cited by others. One possible drawback of this approach is that authors may be citing the single author in a negative context (saying that the author doesn't know what s/he's talking about, for instance)."

Contd…..

– Co-Citation Coupling "is a method used to establish a subject similarity between two documents. If papers A and B are both cited by paper C, they may be said to be related to one another, even though they don't directly cite each other. If papers A and B are both cited by many other papers, they have a stronger relationship. The more papers they are cited by, the stronger their relationship is."

– Bibliographic Coupling "operates on a similar principle, but in a way it is the mirror image of co-citation coupling. Bibliographic coupling links two papers that cite the same articles, so that if papers A and B both cite paper C, they may be said to be related, even though they don't directly cite each other. The more papers they both cite, the stronger their relationship is.“

Contd….• The best known facilitation of citation analysis is that of the

Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), which publishes several citation indexes to journals in various fields. – ISI’s Web of Science includes

• Science Citation Expanded• Social Sciences Citation Index• Arts & Humanities Citation Index

– For I-School students, access to ISI journals is available through UT-Austin Library Online (UTLOL), via “Databases and Indexes to Articles”.

• Web Applications of Bibliometrics– Cybermetrics. "Recently, a new growth area in bibliometrics has been

in the emerging field of webmetrics, or cybermetrics as it is often called. Webmetrics can be defined as using of bibliometric techniques in order to study the relationship of different sites on the World Wide Web. Such techniques may also be used to map out (called "scientific mapping" in traditional bibliometric research) areas of the Web that appear to be most useful or influential, based on the number of times they are hyperlinked to other Web sites."

Content Analysis

• In the social sciences and humanities, content analysis is the analysis of texts of various types including writing, images, recordings and cultural artifacts. Content analysis includes both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Content analysis is used for a variety of purposes including attribution of texts to authors, testing of hypotheses, theory building, and evaluation research.

• In the social sciences, content analysis is a method for studying the content of written texts and artifacts.[1] Earl Babbie defines it as "the study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites, paintings and laws".[2]

• Content analysis is a scholarly method in the humanities by which texts are studied as to authorship, authenticity, or meaning.[3] This latter subject includes philology, hermeneutics, and semiotics.

Historical Research

• Historical research is that which utilizes historical sources like documents remains, etc. to study event or ideas of the past including the philosophy of the person and groups at any remote point of time.

Stylostatistics

Using several stylostatistical techniques and employing inferential statistical analysis, Mosteller and Wallace were able to conclude, "In summary, we can say with better foundation than ever before that Madison was the author of the 12 disputed papers." Historians have generally accepted the Mosteller and Wallace findings as conclusive.

The Mosteller and Wallace book provides a brief history of the Federalist Papers plus a masterful explanation of stylostatistical techniques and their application to the problem of uncovering the authorship of the disputed papers

Conclusion

• The research projects are different from that of academic research degree in regards to different scale of time, resources and extent, pioneering qualities and rigor. Research project actually involves a group work on a pre-assigned topic by the funding agency; it has wide scope in regards to the greater resource availability.

• Thanks