How to Do Research

This is under construction, but the goal of this page is to introduce the undergrad or graduate student to self-directed research. I’ve mixed what I’ve learned throughout my career with a lot of what my former advisor, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, has developed through Beagle Learning, and what I’ve seen in free online resources. I highly recommend that if you are an educator, you look into Beagle’s learning tools and consider them for use in your classroom. https://en.beaglelearning.com/

Ever wonder how scientists come up with research ideas? With entire research projects? Well, a lot of it boils down to reading. As the great horror writer Stephen King says, ‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.’ The best way to do research, is to read a lot of research to learn how to do it, then get started on actually doing it yourself. You will fail, you will get null results sometimes, you won’t answer your research question sometimes, and in the more fun cases you may get an outcome you didn’t expect. Research requires passion, to continue doing research, to continue failing until you succeed, you must be passionate about whatever research topic you may be pursuing.

Starting Research

Literature Review of Current Research

How to Read an Academic Paper

  • There are many ways people suggest reading an academic paper. Some say just read the abstract, section headers, and conclusions as a fast-read. Others place emphasis on the figures. My preferred method is as follows, and I emphasize the figures. The entire time I’m going through this, I am either highlighting on a physical paper (or on my ipad) or I am jotting down main-point notes in a notebook or a google doc.
  • The Order I Use:
    • Start by reading the abstract
    • Next, look at the figures and read the figure captions
    • Check the section and subsection headings to get an idea of the paper outline
    • Now read the introduction if you need some background
    • If there’s a background section and you need background, read that
    • Read the conclusion next
    • If you need additional details on the paper, read methods next
    • Finally, read through results and conclusion
  • Figures are your friends – Hopefully the paper has a “money figure” – this is a figure that summarized the entire paper and its main results into a single figure. This figure is worth screen-shotting and putting into a google doc!

Digesting What You’ve Read

So you read a bunch of papers, cool, well I hope you kept those notes you jotted down! Now you’re going to organize those notes so when you eventually forget everything you read in that paper, you can look at your notes on it and quickly remember exactly what it was about.

  • In one of my favorite grad school classes, we had a topic journal class that we treated as though we were writing news articles about academic papers. We would read through a paper and jot down our summary, then we would put the summary into a 1 to 2-page newspaper format. This made the summary easy to look at later when studying for things like quals, or when reviewing papers to put in as references for publications. I highly suggest this method, especially for visual learners. Don’t be afraid to use bullet points and to include a figure or two!
  • My layout for writing a summary is as follows (2 column format):
    • Paper Title, Authors, Publication date
    • 1-sentence summary of topic
    • 1-sentence summary of main result
    • Bullets of important things in the paper
      • Background info/term definitions
      • Experimental set-up (if there is one, e.g., list instruments)
      • Methods Used
      • Main Results
      • Interesting parts in Discussion/Conclusion
      • Any important references I might want later
    • Include only the most important figure(s) (if there are any)
Partial example of a “newspaper” format summary

Ok so now that you’ve written all these paper summaries about some research topic you’re interested in, you need to bring all that knowledge together. Look back at whatever your main research question was, now write that question on a whiteboard or a large piece of paper.

Creating new research

Coming soon!

Helpful Resources for Research