Your contribution

At this point, you have an area of interest to you, and you have a feeling for the expectations of your particular subject area.Putting this another way, you have a set of starting points in the form of existing published papers, and you know what aspects made them publishable.

Here comes the big question. What will you do? You will conduct an investigation, and your account of it and its conclusions will get published. As we have seen, although the computing discipline is all about software, the actual software is not considered published research.

If you are developing new algorithms or software frameworks, think carefully about the journals you want your work to get into. Do they publish that sort of thing? They will probably want them to be evaluated, so think how you can show your work is better that what is currently available.

If you are developing new theory, mathematical approaches, or decision models, then the journals of interest to you are likely not to be interested in the software itself. How will you validate the new mathematical approach?

If you are applying existing ideas in a challenging area, or considering snags in them, then presumably you are coming up with some fresh approaches. Will your suggestions be useful to others? Will your modified success criteria command general acceptance? Can you write up your case study in a way that allows your approaches to work in other situations?

How much can your experiments be generalised? Can you show that the evaluation data you used were in some way typical? The time to consider all of these issues is now, before you start work. By thinking things through at this stage, you will be considering your own work from the viewpoint of a potential reader. Why this test? Why that interviewee? Why that data?

For students we call this the research methodology section - a title that is really too grand for simply ensuring that what we plan to do will be of publishable quality. Being clear on what we can contribute is the first step towards framing the research question, which we will consider next.