Fundamentals of Scientific Research 750791

1. Fundamentals of Scientific Research750791 Dr. Samer Odeh Hanna (Ph.D.) www.philadelphia.edu.jo/academics/shanna

2. Introduction • About the Lecturer • About the Students • About the Course • Syllabus • Student’s main duties • Marks

3. Reading Research Papers Based on a lecture given at University of Cambridge for the Research Skills Module (Mphil)

4. Research paper • What is a research paper? • Have you ever read a research paper? • Have you ever write a research paper? • Is it easy to read or write a research paper?

5. Scientific Method • Observing things • Formulate a hypothesis (very specific question) • Perform Experiments • Analysis • Conclusion But • Experiments my lead us to an unexpected results that may lead to requiring new observations….(cycle of science)

6. Research question Example research question: • How can I improve transmission latency across the Internet Hypothesis would be: • If I implement protocol X it will improve the latency among two nodes

7. Research Process • Understand other people’s research by reading there papers • As you do research you understand thing you didn’t know. • You discover that you must read about new things. • As you understand their work you know what you do. • When you start writing a research you might discovered that your work has been done by someone else. • Other people build on each other work.

8. How to get started • How do we find the right paper • Most of your study has been on textbooks (memorizing) • We were always told to believe what's in the books • NOW, we are grown up and what we need to find is not in textbooks! • Papers are the source • Papers are Not textbooks (treat them differently)

9. Can we say that “all the papers are good?” • No • Papers my provide a poor research. • Use your brain to judge if a paper has a poor research. • People do bad research by trying to prove something useless • There are pressure to publish (for promotion etc.) • Ask yourself if the research your are reading is good and correct.

10. How do we know if a paper is helpful to our research • Thousands of papers are published everyday • Only you can know that papers that are addressing your research question • For the less important papers only skimming is enough • You don't have to understand everything in a paper

11. Can we say that “all papers are well written?” • No • Many papers are difficult to be understood (either badly written or we do not have the knowledge) • Apply critical judgment on a paper. • You don’t need to understand everything in a paper but only the important stuff. • This course will teach you how to write an understandable, well written paper (next lecture)

12. How to pick the right paper to read? • What questions to ask about a paper on hand: 1- Do I need to read this paper (Is it important for my research?) 2- What are they actually trying to find out? 3- Why is this important? 4- What did they actually measured? 5- What theorem they are trying to prove? 6- What where the results? 7- What did they conclude? 8- How they concluded it? 9- Do you believe them?

13. Exercise 1 • Read the following paper: Li, N., Xie, T., Jin, M. & Liy, C. (2010). Perturbation-based user-input-validation testing of web applications, The Journal of Systems and Software 83(2010), pp. 2263-2274. And then write and present a summary about answering the questions in the slide 12.

14. Questions? • Wishing you a happy Eid