How to do Research: Understand Basic of basics
Research is a systematic process that focuses on gathering information and analysis of that to draw a conclusion.
Research process requires multiple steps. Regardless of research type, Researcher executes below all steps to carry out his research and again clarify the questions raised on the findings.
Research should be documented in such a way that there must be some scope of new findings after reviewing it. This is the beauty of research that another individual can conduct the same study and will find a new outcome. This is known as replicating the study.
Research Steps
Below are steps which have to apply to conduct research in the given sequence:
Identify Research Problem
As a first step, find out a research problem based on your interest and skills. i.e. finding efficient sorting method to sort the given data. There are already many methods available for sorting. Still an individual can perform further research to find out its better solution.
Another example will be finding more efficient technique to transmit data over the network securely using an encryption technique.
Build your Understanding
In this step, you will gather maximum information around identified problem. Search related information on internet, read available literature, get membership of paid journals and try to make solid understanding about the problem domain.
An exit criteria of this step is to have sufficient knowledge about the existing methods carried out to solve such kind of problems.
i.e. for sorting method, review of literature provides the ideas about existing methods to solve it as well as the factors affecting the efficiency of the method. For encryption/decryption, identify various encryption/decryption algorithms available with their pros and cons.
Narrow Down the Scope
Based on existing information collected in step 2, you need to narrow down the scope of the problem from a broad topic to a specific research issue.
i.e. To formulate a sorting method, you can choose to design either an internal sorting method or external sorting method. Likewise in encryption/ decryption, you can decide whether you will develop an algorithm to encrypt/decrypt text or images.
Choose Research Method
The method used to study the identified research problem refers to the research method. Various research methods are available to investigate the research problem like quantitative, qualitative, applied, analytic etc. You need to choose best appropriate method to start your research based on your problem domain.
i.e. To identify an efficient sorting algorithm, a quantitative research method will be used. It will help to design a mathematical model based on given input data. For an encryption/decryption algorithm, applied research method can be used. Here your design will be based on which type of data is transmitted, what is the critical level of the application and how data is transmitted in the application.
You can refer my blog for more information about methods. Research is invention or discovery
Collect Data
In this step, collect data to answer your research problem. Data can be collected through number of ways like in the form of questionnaire, through survey, from the literature, from the society, through observation etc.
To design a sorting method, you can consider a random sequence of numbers to be sort. For encryption/decryption for text, you can use existing text files which are being used in particular application.
Analyse Data and Prepare Report
You have collected data which need to be analysed and you have chosen research method which specifies how data will be analysed.
Now you will do your analysis on the data via research method and prepare reports which describe solution of your research problem. You will also do a comparative study of your solution with the existing one to describe how your solution is more efficient from existing one.
In designing of sorting method, you will propose a better and efficient sorting method and perform it on the given data. You will also do comparative study between proposed algorithm and the previously exiting methods and conclude whether the new one is more efficient or not.
Similarly implement a new cryptography method and apply it to the identified data (text, image etc) and then analyse the result with the existing methods.
Time to Celebrate
You will share your reports with experts. They will check whether the required solution of the proposed research problem is accomplished or not. If report is approved, it will be published in journal so that other researcher can study that as part of their research Step 2.