Fundamentals of Scientific Research Dr. Samer Odeh Hanna (Ph.D.)

Introduction About the Lecturer About the Students About the Course Syllabus Student’s main duties Marks 2

Based on a lecture given at University of Cambridge for the Research Skills Module (Mphil) Reading Research Papers 3

Research paper What is a research paper? Have you ever read a research paper? Have you ever write a research paper? Is it easy to read or write a research paper?

Scientific Method Observing things Formulate a hypothesis (very specific question) Perform Experiments Analysis Conclusion But Experiments my lead us to an unexpected results that may lead to requiring new observations….(cycle of science) 5

Research question Example research question : How can I improve transmission latency across the Internet Hypothesis would be: If I implement protocol X it will improve the latency among two nodes 6

Research Process Understand other people’s research by reading there papers As you do research you understand thing you didn’t know. You discover that you must read about new things. As you understand their work you know what you do. When you start writing a research you might discovered that your work has been done by someone else. Other people build on each other work. 7

How to get started How do we find the right paper Most of your study has been on textbooks (memorizing) We were always told to believe what's in the books NOW, we are grown up and what we need to find is not in textbooks! Papers are the source Papers are Not textbooks (treat them differently) 8

Can we say that “all the papers are good?” No Papers my provide a poor research. Use your brain to judge if a paper has a poor research. People do bad research by trying to prove something useless There are pressure to publish (for promotion etc.) Ask yourself if the research your are reading is good and correct. 9

How do we know if a paper is helpful to our research Thousands of papers are published everyday Only you can know that papers that are addressing your research question For the less important papers only skimming is enough You don't have to understand everything in a paper 10

Can we say that “all papers are well written?” No Many papers are difficult to be understood (either badly written or we do not have the knowledge) Apply critical judgment on a paper. You don’t need to understand everything in a paper but only the important stuff. This course will teach you how to write an understandable, well written paper (next lecture) 11

How to pick the right paper to read? What questions to ask about a paper on hand: 1- Do I need to read this paper (Is it important for my research?) 2- What are they actually trying to find out? 3- Why is this important? 4- What did they actually measured? 5- What theorem they are trying to prove? 6- What where the results? 7- What did they conclude? 8- How they concluded it? 9- Do you believe them? 12

Exercise 1 Read the following paper: Li, N., Xie, T., Jin, M. & Liy, C. (2010). Perturbation-based user-input- validation testing of web applications, The Journal of Systems and Software 83(2010), pp And then write and present a summary about answering the questions in the slide 12.

Questions? Wishing you a happy Eid 14