Elements of Research

The ultimate aim of any research investigation is to publish the outcomes of the work, as a paper, thesis, or report. Without such a document, the work may never become public, there is no enduring record that the work took place, and other scientists cannot learn from the researchers' experience.

The first part of the tutorial concerns writing for researchers: why we write and what the purposes of a piece of technical writing are; how to organize a technical report; how to go about the process of writing; how to use writing to plan the research; and some common pitfalls in technical writing.

To write, there must be something to write about. A paper or thesis is the outcome of a research activity, in which the aim is to develop new results and produce evidence that is strong enough to convince even skeptics that the work is of value. The second part of the tutorial concerns this activity: how to approach experimentation; what it is that an experiment (or a theory) is trying to achieve; how to measure research outcomes; and the limitations of experiments, experimenters, and theory.

A student who undertakes research is joining a community of researchers. This community - which has no law, judges, or police - has strong expectations of its members, particularly with regard to honesty, authorship, and treatment of others. The third part of the tutorial concerns the ethical conduct of research: what these expectations are; guidelines for day-to-day research practice; and how to deal with real or perceived ethical issues.

Bio

Professor Justin Zobel received his BSc(Hons) and PhD from the University of Melbourne, where he worked for several years as a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. Since 1990 he has been based in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, where he now leads the Search Engine group. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Information Retrieval, an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and of Information Processing & Management, and Treasurer of ACM SIGIR. He is the author of several textbooks, including the research methods text "Writing for Computer Science", and approximately 150 academic papers. In the research community, he is best known for his role in the development of algorithms for efficient text retrieval, which underpin applications such as web search engines. His expertise also includes fundamental data structures and algorithms, plagiarism detection, string algorithms, compression, and research methods.