.
Start reading the literature.
http://scholar.google.com is your friend. I’ve also found Microsoft Academic is useful. Type in the topic area, whatever it is.
Begin looking at the links that are returned. Read the abstracts. Download the papers that interest you - when I download them I add the data of publication and the title of the paper as the name (because often the names give you no contextual clue as to the contents). It is also a good practice to capture the biblographic data (I grab the BibTeX since I write my CS papers in LaTeX) because you will need it when you start writing.
Start reading the interesting papers. Usually by the time you are done reading the introduction you will know if you want to read further. If you really liked the paper, then use the search engines to find papers that reference the paper you like.
If you are looking for the latest research, restrict your search to the past four years. I usually work backwards from the more recent work to older work. Sometimes I find survey articles, which can be great, usually I will find a few papers that are heavily referenced (100+ references) and that is often indicative of importance of the work.
Summarize those papers. For the ones you thought most relevant try to note what you learned from the paper. What did you like? What did you not like? Were there any areas they failed to address? Did they conflict with other work in the field? If so, why?
If you are looking for a research question try to identify something the paper didn’t do: maybe a technique you think they could have used, or a dataset, or specific equipment. Look to see if any of the other papers have done that. If not, you now have a potential research question: “What happens if we use X when addressing problem Y.” Then think up ways that you can “fail fast” - how can you see if there is merit to that approach. If not, you want to know quickly so you can discard that approach before you spend too much time on it. If it looks promising, then push further and see where your research takes you.
As you do this work, write it up. If you are really disciplined, you will start writing your research paper before you have done the research. That will help you think about how you want to present your findings, which in turn helps you focus on what you need to do to generate the necessary data. Of course, you are likely to find out things don’t work the way that you wanted and you’ll have to rewrite your paper. This way you do have a history of what you did as well. When you’re done, you’ll have a research paper.
That’s the point at which you’ll have to tear it apart. Criticize it. Find its weaknesses. Think about how you will fix those weaknesses or address them (“we did not investigate X and leave it for future work…”) Then ask other people to read it - they won’t have any of your insight so if you aren’t explaining it so they can understand why your work is important (the abstract and introduction!) then you need to go back an rewrite those sections.
At some point you decide you are done with the paper: the time allotted to it has expired, the work has been accepted for publication, you’re sick of it and want to do anything else.
Good luck!
.
Tony Mason, PhD from The University of British Columbia (2022)
.
.
Read More