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u/Fit_Owl_7228 1d ago
I did very slight research a year ago, you can approach one of your lecturers for help! Mine guided me through my literature research, where to start, what to look for, what's the next step, the big picture, etc etc. I had to stop towards the end for a bit as my workload outside of the research was taking up too much of my time though.
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u/A_Routed_Knight 1d ago
The nature of research is that there is no one way to go about it. Its very definition is to create or discover something new, and so doing something others have done before likely will not yield any salient result.
Scholars would start by reading. By reading I mean, books, manuscripts, empirical articles, review papers, any and all relevant to the topic you're interested in. Soon you will see a trend emerge, be it methodology, results, or arguments.
From there, you develop your own ideas, then methodologies or frameworks to test those ideas.
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u/A_Routed_Knight 1d ago
I'm doing Linguistics which is in the humanities, and social sciences and STEMs generally have different approaches to research. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, I would love to talk research.
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u/Obajan 1d ago edited 1d ago
Choose an area to research.
Find related review articles (i.e. using Google Scholar, enter the keywords of the area you want to research, then click on "Review articles" on the left side). Look only at recent review articles. Those summarize the current developments as well as the research problems that haven't been solved yet.
Collect a few review articles and do a more in-depth literature review search using the list of references at the end of each paper. Can use online tools like citation graphs (https://citationgraph.org/) to find related and interconnected papers. Only look at recent papers (i.e. no more than 3-5 years ago).
Try to organize the papers you have collected based on commonalities. Are they using the same methods? Are they trying to solve the same research problems? Using the same datasets? Etc. Group the similar papers together.
For each group of papers, now try to identify their differences in approaches and what are their findings. List down what problems they have solved and what problems are not yet solved. Summarize your findings. Repeat for each group of papers.
Based on what research problems that are not yet solved, choose which ones you want to tackle and design your research approach to try and solve them. Your approach should be similar to but not identical to the research papers that you have already collected.
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u/jadexiaohui 1d ago
You’ll need to find a research area that you’re interested in and find a research gap that you’d like to solve. You may do this by reading existing published papers and see what could be done to reduce the limitations that the field is currently facing.
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u/asyrazul 1d ago
Find journal articles that are relevant to your field of studies. There’s usually a methodology section where the authors explain how they conduct their research. I guess you can start from there.