how to do research in writing the thesis.docx

1、how to do research in writing the thesisHow to do researchThe first thing to say is that if it has to be done, its you whos got to do it. You. Theres no-one else to do the project for you.Very likely, theres no-one who will give you any help. Youre the one who cares, the drive has got to come from w

2、ithin you. Youre the one who knows how to answer the question, no-one else knows as much. The above is not the whole truth - as your project evolves, youll find yourself receiving technical help, wisdom, and emotional support from a great many people - but you need to be aware that self-reliance is

3、vital.There may be other types of research, e.g., in which a neophyte is fitted into a slot in the God Professors program. I dont have experience of them.neophyte: a person who has recently started an activityDo. It is important that you start the main activities of the research - experimentation, o

4、r survey, or simulation, or data analysis - sooner rather than later. A common mistake is to think and plan and read, and never get round to the main game. When you start, you may find that the real difficulties and issues are quite different from what you thought in the abstract.Research has severa

5、l components, for example: thinking of the question, answering the question, communicating the answer. It may be worth mentioning that not all of these are essential.Even without much of a question, one can collect some data, summarise it, and report the results. Certainly if youre the first to thin

6、k of this kind of data, thats all you need to do. Certainly if the data keeps changing from year to year (e.g., accidents, and many other society-level phenomena), this type of study is always useful to a greater or lesser extent.Even without an answer, the question is sometimes such a good one that

7、 it is worth telling others about. (It might be that you dont have time to answer it, or are uninterested, or not competent in the necessary techniques.)Sometimes you dont want to communicate your question and answer. They might have turned out to be less interesting than you thought when you starte

8、d. Or you might want to wait until youve done something additional.Nevertheless, most research has all three components. The answering and the communicating can be dismissed quite briefly.The fact that youre doing research is strong evidence that you have the skills necessary to answer the question.

9、 Not all of them, perhaps, but enough to work out a way of attacking the research and to serve as a foundation for additional skills to be learnt along the way. Incidentally, as a rule of thumb, if there is a course on something, people think of it as a low-level skill - it is not necessarily below

10、your dignity as a researcher, but you dont get any merit badges for mastering it. (I am a little concerned at the increasing amount of structured studies that universities are prescribing for their first-year research students. To my mind, the overwhelming priority at that stage is to do a doable pi

11、ece of research, not attend lectures on bibliographic tools and the institutions policy on intellectual property.)As to non-technical aspects of answering the question, there is some advice below.There are lots of textbooks and courses to aid you in your scientific writing. Essentially, though, it i

12、s all a matter of practice.One of the reasons I recommend psychology to students is that you cant escape either the use of numbers or the use of words. (Economics is another good subject from this point of view, but it doesnt have much of an experimental component.)As soon as youve got a message to

13、communicate, you should write a report on it, not wait until the whole project is finished. That probably means writing 1000 words per week, every week. Just occasionally, supervisors forget to tell new writers the obvious -the easiest sections to write are the descriptions of the results, and of wh

14、at you did (because these sections are highly constrained by the facts), and you should write these first; what the results mean, and why you did what you did, are altogether more problematic, so theDiscussion and Introduction sections should be written later. If youre desperate, imagine youre speak

15、ing to a friend about your work, and write down what you would say. (Then, as always,revise and edit, revise and edit, revise and edit.)Some research has to be done to a tight deadline - for example, the final-year projects carried out by undergraduates. The big difference this makes is that you don

16、t have time (which you do in most situations) to get things wrong and then do them again. The consequence is that theres a good deal of luck involved at this stage, so I think that if your final-year projectfalls flat on its facefail completely, usually causing embarrassment, it doesnt mean you wont

17、 be good at research in a more normal environment.It is only natural for a student to ask What will get me good marks? In assessing theses, some universities havemarking schemes - u marks are allocated forthe project design, v marks are allocated forthe conduct of the experiment or survey, w marks a

18、re allocated for thegeneral writing of the thesis, x marks are allocated for thereview of previous literature, y marks are allocated forthe presentation of the results, z marks are allocated for theinterpretation of the findings, and so on. Other universities have no such marking scheme. (Even where

19、 one exists, it is very often impracticable to use it strictly.) My advice in such a situation may be different from that of others. But, for what its worth, here it is. My impression is thatstudents typically spend too much time reviewing past literature, and not enough time thinking about it and c

20、riticising it. The students ideas need to be firmly grounded in established wisdom, not plucked out ofcloud cuckoo land脱离现实的幻境. Butthe thing that will most impress the marker of a thesis isa focus on the central ideas,a willingness to criticise imprecise thinking by previous authors,the dissection o

21、f what is essential from what is less relevant, and the demonstration of how the students ideas sharpen what has previously been blunt. In other words, intellectualoomphthe activeness of an energetic personality.An important issue is that of what to study. If you have ideas, theres no problem. But,

22、is there anything you can do to prompt ideas to come to you?Or, in the absence of ideas, how can you do something worthwhile? I dont suppose theres a complete answer to these questions, but the following comments are intended to be helpful.To get ideas, expose yourself to them. Talk to someone about

23、 your research. Yourmum or dad, for example. Or (though Ive never tried this) the top stream of 13-year-olds at your local selective high school. Brainstorming with your colleagues isbetter than nothing聊胜于无, but youre not really forced to decode your talk sufficientlyconvert code into ordinary langu

24、age. Anyway, there are other uses for your colleagues, such as being rude to you.It is tremendously valuable if theressomeone in your circle who canbring off to succeed in doing something difficultthe trick of being rude without causing offence. Suppose you are a cognitive psychologist, and in a sem

25、inar you claim that activation flows through the levels of your model. You benefit if someone from another tradition confronts you with the claim that activation, flows, and levels are all meaningless. It is generally up to the young to do this.Informal seminars, where you listen to others, and talk

26、 yourself, are an important part of this. Read widely.(But remember what I said earlier:reading is not what research is about. Indeed, I would say there is a type of personality for whom too much reading is a major danger to their ever doing anything worthwhile.)oHow to read: read the title, skim th

27、e abstract, look at the pictures and maybe the tables, and if theres anything interesting, then consult the text, looking for that specific point. (No-one starts at the beginning of a paper and works their way through to the end.)oWhat to read:many of theprestigious journals are best avoided, as the

28、y have got into the habit of attending to a lot of details that everyone knows are unimportant, thus diluting the real message. The papers are polished and bland, and the reader is sucked into taking them on their own terms. You need something rougher, that you can get to grips with.Comments and let

29、ters in any journal. Whatever the point is, it is made quickly. Furthermore, an area of controversy may be highlighted for you.Journals from outside your main discipline that are relevant to your topic.For example, if your own discipline is psychology, see what the management, sociology, medicine, a

30、nd engineering journals are saying about your topic. They may very well take sufficiently different an attitude to provoke thought. And interdisciplinary journals, e.g., on the borders of music and psychology, or law and statistics.For the same reason,journals from countriesthat Americans have never

31、 heard of (such as Germany, India, and Japan).Low prestige journals sometimes publish simple data on unusual questions - if the topic attracts you, ideas for improving the method or generalising the results will soon come.For the same reason, you can often find mental stimulation in journals from 60

32、 or 80 years ago.oYour attitude: sympathetic criticism. So muchjunk is published that a degree of sceptical hostility is appropriatewhen approaching most papers (unless the author is on the Approved List). But temper this with sympathy: a paper may be useless to you, and it may even be clear that by any reasonable standard the research was a waste of time, but yet the method may be useful to one reader, a detail in the results may be just what a second reader is looking for, and a third reader may find her thoughts clarified by a point in