Secondary Research

By now you have a potential topic, and a set of relevant, recent research papers. Soon you will need to start thinking what your contribution to this topic might be. First though, the existing work needs a good deal more study.

Critically analyse each of the papers in your collection: if one of them is really interesting from your point of view, look to see what papers have cited it. Carefully consider what is the contribution of the paper. Has it given you a theoretical framework for investigation? How has it been validated? What primary evidence does it review? What tests does it apply? How does it demonstrate its value?

Partly these questions allow you to assess the research itself. More importantly for your future research, it allows you to learn about the research culture that is current in your discipline. What sort of experimental analysis is regarded as conclusive, what sorts of aspects are the ones to take into consideration, and what sort of contributions are seen as valuable. You will almost certainly find some aspects of this a little strange. Rather than dismiss them in favour of your own prejudices, though, look in nearby articles to see if conforming to the approach and culture is a price that you will need to pay for getting your ideas published.

There probably aren't enough details in the paper, especially if it is computing related. Retrace the steps it describes and check that you understand all of them. If there is source code, look at it, install it, compile it, and try to trace parts of the execution. If you are going to use this as a starting point of your research, then you really need to be able to repeat the tests it applies. If you get stuck, or really need to contact the authors for their data or code, check that there aren't other avenues to explore before you pester the authors. Bear in mind that not everyone is willing to share their code, for reasons that might be justifiable.

All of this comes under the heading of secondary research, because no matter how much time this takes, none of this is your original work. Even if you improve their description of their framework, implement it on another platform, or run more interesting tests, it is still secondary work.

Just occasionally there might be some primary research that directly follows from such a paper. Looking at its evidence base, or combining it with evidence from another source, you may be able to make, and validate, some significant improvement to their approach, or re-interpret their approach from a very different point of view.

It will be more usual, though, for your primary research to address a research question that is not directly considered in the papers you have found. That will be the next topic in this blog.