Literature review: Arriving at your research question

Literature review:Arriving at your research question

 Introduction

Reading a research paper

Question

Imagine that you've done a literature survey, and you've collected several published research papers that look really interesting. You wish to read and understand them, and incorporate the knowledge you gain into your own research.
What do you think is the best way to read a research paper?
 

Read a paper from the beginning to the end, making notes and trying to remember the concepts

Option 2

Look for the key findings and check if they are useful for your work

Option 3

Make a list of relevant questions or points based on the subject area and type of paper, and when you read the paper look for answers to these

Feedback

3 is correct.

Questions to consider

When you read a published research paper, try to seek answers to questions such as the following:

• Is the context for the research study clear?
  • This is usually covered in the first part of the introduction. You can look up the papers cited in the introduction to understand the context more deeply.
• What is the research question(s) or hypothesis(es)?
  • You should be able to find this near the end of the introduction. 
• Do the methods seem complete? Is precise information given?
• Is anything in the paper relevant for the research project you hope to do? If so, which are the relevant parts?
  • For example, you may want to adopt or modify a method used in the paper, you may want to build upon a particular aspect of the study, you may want to repeat the study in your environment or setting, etc.

If you have trouble figuring out any of the above, or anything else in the paper, make a note of it. Then, discuss your questions with your research team or with other researchers locally or on online networks. If you spot anything problematic in the paper, discuss that too. Don't assume that every published paper is perfect!
Finally, be patient as a reader. Research papers can be complicated. You may need to read a paper more than once to understand it well.

Quality and impact

In addition to considering the questions mentioned in the previous page, try to gauge the quality and impact of the paper you are reading.

Quality
A common proxy for the quality of a research paper is the reputability of the journal in which it has been published. Papers that have been published in reputable journals have usually gone through a rigorous peer review process, so you can feel somewhat confident of trusting such papers. Later in this course, you'll learn more about how to identify reputable journals.

Impact
The citations a published paper has received is a measure of that paper's impact. In an academic database such as Google Scholar, you can easily see the citations to a published paper.
Below is a screenshot of how a paper appears on Google Scholar:

You can see the title and link to this paper, followed by the names of the authors and an excerpt from the abstract. Below this, you can see a link called "Cited by 24". This is a link to a list of papers that have cited this particular paper.
This information is useful in two ways:

• If a paper has been cited, it has had some impact on future scholarly work.
• You can click the "Cited by..." link to see the papers that have cited a particular paper. Those papers may also be useful references!

That said, you shouldn't judge a paper based on the number of citations, because this metric is strongly related to the area of research and not comparable across different subject areas. Papers in some fields attract a lot more citations than papers in other fields.

Reading as a team

Just as research is a team effort, reading is also a team effort. It can be hard to make sense of some research papers, so if you have any research colleagues, try to discuss papers together.
Have you heard of book clubs? A book club is a group of people who meet regularly to discuss books that they have read recently.

Similarly, a "journal club" is a group of scholars who meet to discuss papers published in journals. Many of the world’s most productive research groups have regular journal club meetings.

Are you part of a journal club? If not, try to form one with your colleagues. You could identify some journals or research papers to read every week or month. Then all of you could meet regularly to discuss what you have learnt and help each other understand the papers.

More advice online

When you get a chance, try doing a search on Google with these keywords: how to read a paper
You will come across several articles! For example, a series of articles on how to read different types of papers in the health sciences is available on the website of The BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal): http://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-readers/publications/how-read-paper. Take a look at them if you work in this field. 

Arriving at your research question(s)

Try to arrange the options given in the drop-down menus below in the right order of steps, from knowing what your area of research is to reaching the point where you have a sense of direction for doing research.

Step 1:  Cloze (1): What is my area of research?
Step 2:  Cloze (2): What is known so far in this area?
Step 3:  Cloze (3): What is not known in this area?
Step 4: Which unknown do I want to focuson in my research

Identifying relevant unknowns

A typical scientific research paper addresses one or at most a few research questions or hypotheses.
Recall the four steps mentioned in the previous page. The fourth step was: "Which unknowns do I want to focus on?"
Consider the following to answer this question:

• Why is it important to address a particular unknown or gap? What contribution will it make to the knowledge or practice in your field?
• Would your investigation into a particular unknown be relevant for an academic journal?
• Do you have the means (knowledge, people, funding) to direct your research to explore this

  Formulating a research question

   

  Question

  A research question is a clear and specific question that forms the basis of your research project.
  
  Three examples of research questions are given below. Try to identify the question that is the most specific.
  

  Answers

  Option 1

  What types of pesticides might bees be exposed to in major crops?
  

  Option 2

  Are honey bees exposed to pesticides in major crops?
  

  Option 3

  What happens when bees are exposed to pesticides?
  
  unknown?

1 is correct!

End matter

This lesson has been developed by INASP, an international development charity in the UK, as an extension of the work carried out by the AuthorAID team. Visit inasp.info and authoraid.info to learn about our work.
This lesson was authored and developed by Ravi Murugesan, an INASP Associate. The content was reviewed by Dr Barbara Gastel, also an INASP Associate, and Dr Anne Riederer, an environmental health scientist and technical advisor to Blacksmith Institute. Parts of this lesson were based on material in AuthorAID workshops facilitated by Dr Gastel.

We have used a free and open source e-learning authoring tool called eXeLearning (http://exelearning.net/?lang=en) to create this lesson.
This lesson was last updated on 26 May 2015.

Licensing
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.