My research methodology, formalized :)

Ok, here's the scenario. You are in a conference hall lecturing some of the brilliant minds about your research, people are taking your notes!!! (aha), asking you fancy questions and you just bowl them over with your elegant answers (double aha). The conference is a great success, your teachers are impressed by you; who knows, your name just might appear in the news paper (now you can hear violins playing in the background). Suddenly you hear your mom shouting, struggling to wake you up from your slumber...grrr (Sad reality of life, good moments don't last long). Anyways, this dream has motivated you to write your very own research paper except for one teeny little problem. You dunno how to start. Oh, i hear your nerdish blood throbbing, good good, you can read on...

Research is and always has been intuitive in nature. Most great things are just stumbled upon.., rarely do people plan and do something ingenious. If you are like me, then DO NOT rely on luck expecting a golden apple to fall right into your hands, work your way towards it. 99% of research is planned. Plan and work towards your goal, its that simple.

Research topic/problem selection

1) Select an interesting area of your choice. Its better if you have some former knowledge on it. I know big bang stuff sounds cool, but its way outta my league; so, select something that fits in your knowledge domain. Lets see, i am into software stuff...that should be a good place to start.

2) Narrow down your domain. Ask yourself, "what in software stuff"? Hmm, for me it would be business modeling and analysis, just follow your interests.

3) This is very important...what are my time constraints? How much research time (fool around time) can i afford? 1 month? 1 year?? Just keep an approx time frame in your mind before you proceed any further.

4) Research type falls under three major categories (lol, i just made that up)

• Listing industrial/personal experience with something.
• Survey of existing techniques/models/methods or whatever.
• Augmenting/extending/improving existing stuff.
• Coming up with something new in a particular area.
• Coming up with something so dramatic, that it gives rise to a new field of study (like human computation or neotic sciences)

Did i say three categories? That's because you wouldn't be reading this post if you are researching 4th or 5th category. So for all purposes of the study (i know, it sounds L.A.M.E.), lets just focus on the first three categories. Also, the categories are arranged in the increasing order of difficulty (usually, not always the case).

5) Its now the time to narrow down your domain further. Business analysis and modeling is a very large area. It will certainly consist of many sub-parts, explore each one of those sub-parts.

• If you are attempting a research paper of category 1, then all you have to do is formalize your experience on a paper. It might seem lame to you, but it will make sense to many others.
• If you wanna survey, be sure to choose a sub topic that's very extensive, i.e., has too many models/techniques each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
• For the third category, your immediate goal should be to determine possible research areas/problems.

Based on these factors, choose a suitable sub-part. If its not in compliance with your time frame, repeat step 5 or jump back to step 2. ( I know, i know, its like a bloody pseudo code)

6)For either of these categories, you gotta do some literature study. Try to get one of those survey papers that has a comprehensive analysis of all or most popularly available methods. You could google something like "sub-part survey ieee", "sub-part survey papers" or "sub-part research areas", "sub-part research problems". This should give you a head start. Also, do save the pdf copies as they will be used later on for references.

From this point on i am just gonna discuss about 3rd category of research. Maybe i'll write about the first two categories later on...Here goes, make a list of all the positive and negative counterparts of each method. All you have to do is come up with one, that has all the strength's and none of the weakness (easier said than done). Ok, if not none of the weaknesses part, try to get all the positive attributes together in your method/model.

By the end of these six steps, you should have come up with a problem worth investigating. Believe it or not, deciding upon a good problem is effectively 30% of the research (at least, according to me).

Now the next step is to find a solution to your problem and then write your paper. Both these tasks are very daunting and i am feeling very sleepy right now. I will write about these in my next post. Hope you find this article useful.