Stopping research???

1. Stopping Research and Starting to Write Stopping research??? Dr. Hillary HartCAEE October 19, 2009

2. At what stage of research are you?

3. How do you capture what you are doing and put it in context with others’ work ? • How and when do you begin writing up your own research? • What does it mean to “review the literature,” and what is the purpose of the literature review anyway? • How do you gather the relevant data? • How do you use your own visuals to think through your findings?

4. You can use writing to help yourself answer many critical questions: • What is it you really want to say? • What will convince your audience? • What data or information do you still need to collect? • When you explain your methodology, what gaps are still there?

5. Writing is a process. • Defining objectives • Planning • Drafting • Evaluating • Revising Learn to separate these stages!

6. You cannot collapse these stages together! You can’t get it right the first time around!

7. You can managethe writing process. • Start early • Manage your time • Learn to draft – avoid need for perfection at this stage • Learn to separate the creativeand criticalparts of your personality.

8. Writing activities are incremental and iterative. • Move back and forth between doing research/engineering work and doing writing. • Writing helps you understand what you really know and what you are still unsure about. Helps you plot direction.

9. Writing 1stdraft Introduction Methods Literature Review Results Conclusions Revising middle three chapters Conclusions Introduction Revise all again And again Write Abstract Suggested sequence of drafting and revising:

10. 2. Reviewing the literature: What makes this difficult?

11. What is the purpose of the Literature Review?

12. What is missing What we know What is the purpose of the Literature Review? • To acknowledge work of others • To establish your credibility as a scholar • To give needed background • To show that your work is unique (identify the gap) • To produce a rationale or justification for your study • To evaluate and synthesize previous work Adapted from M. Alley, Penn State University

13. In your review of relevant literature . . . • Include all work truly relevant to yours. • Demonstrate continuity and show gaps. The literature review is a big part of the for your work. conceptual justification

14. 3. How do you find all the literaturepertinent to yourresearch? • Subject search • uses keywords • Snowball search • moves backward in time – begins with recent publication • Citation search • moves forward in time -- begins with key paper • Star search • looks at “star” journals or institutions

15. Snowball (a) and Citation (b) Douglas (2007) Nicol et al. (1999) (a) Gaiver (1996) Bardeen (1994) Glasser (2004) IEEE Trans Auschnitt (1995) Haus (1986) (b) Haus (1975) IEEE Journal Lugovoi (1979) Optics

16. Search Tools: Indexes and Databases • Science Citation Index – available through the Web of Science • Engineering databases • Academic Search Complete • You need your EID • Covers trade and industrial publications as well as journals published by professional societies. • EiCompendex • Covers these fields: Aerospace, Architecture and Planning, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry ,Engineering Materials Science, Science and Technology, Transportation • even includes conferences

17. More Search Tools • SciFinder Scholar – download from McKinney Engineering library • Includes conferences and dissertations, etc. • Has elegant search engine • Google Scholar • Others?

18. How do we take all that research and develop it into a Literature Review section?

19. Summarize the information. • As soon as you finish reading a piece (article, report, even an abstract), summarize it in your own words. • the contents • the relevance (or not) to your project • Summarizing makes a manageable paragraph out of a much bigger work. • Save your summaries electronically.

20. To outline a literature review, make a table summarizing what other researchers have done.

21. Then add a column summarizing what that contribution means for your work/project.

22. Use graphics to thinkthrough as well as conveyinformation. Preparing your information displays first helps you get started and sets out the framework of your written or spoken communication.

23. Which visual representation will bring out the meaning of the data best? • Which, perhaps previously hidden, meanings are there to be brought out? Choice of visual display can reveal new relationships among data. Representing the data differently can lead to new findings.

24. In 1854, Dr. John Snow made a map of deaths from the cholera epidemicin London. Example: Snow’s spatial representation Previously, data on deaths had been displayed chronologically. Tufte, Visual Explanations, 1997

25. Figure 2. Reported Illness and Death in London in 1854

26. Work House Brewery

27. How best to discoverthe useful relationships among the data? • Snow took data normally displayed chronologically and graphed them spatially. • Map makes quantitative comparisons visible and locates them spatially. • Map is good for showing cause and effect. • Time series chart not as effective for showing cause and effect (except in controlled experiments). • “ . . . the way in which we present the data determines what can be seen in the data.” • Valiela, Doing Science, p. 183

28. How best to display the useful relationships among the data? • Choice of data display is especially critical when trying to convince authorities or other experts. • Spatial display convinced the authorities to shut down the Broad St. pump. From that moment, cholera was seriously understood to be linked to pathogens in water.

29. The guru of good information design: Edward Tufte. • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983 • Envisioning Information, 1990 • Visual Explanations, 1997