It has been a half term since I became a master student from an undergraduate student. The most different and difficult thing is that we must learn to research independently. However, after spending some time and effort reading, communicating, and experimenting, I gradually start to get the tips.
Although I’ve written a blog about how to read papers ( which is listed below), we cannot get the whole research process as the paper does not shed light on the process of how the problem was identified or how the solution was devised. Reading a research paper without insight into the process can make research seem even more mystical.
Indeed, some useful blogs I’ve read tell me that the process of research can be formulary divided into some common problems. Here are some solutions for common challenges we may face in our research process.
There’re many difficult problems to work on, some of which are worth working on as a researcher, and others are best left to someone else. Developing research taste can help us determine which problems to solve.
To start with, we should hop on the trend. Of course, we can try to create a totally new direction, but it may involve changing what the whole community thinks. However, we can shorten the process by just easily looking around to identify and predict what is needed by the whole community. The upstream of conferences is a good place to identify the trends.
Another good way to select a problem is that we can revisit old problems with new assumptions. As some old problems were solved with some assumptions which are not effective now (due to the increasing technology and computing ability), it can be worthwhile to revisit them to consider whether recent developments have made the problems more tractable.
Generalize the specific. When reading a collection of papers on a particular problem, it can be helpful to determine whether a specific paper provides a general solution or just an approach to a specific point. If particular papers only offer point solutions, there may be room for generalization.
Solving a problem also requires a new perspective or way of thinking and it has several patterns that seem to repeatedly arise.
It may help a lot to relate new concepts to some old concepts we have already understood. At the same time, some ideas of the solution to old problems may also inspire us to work on new problems. Analogies might create the biggest breakthroughs when they come from outside of our immediate discipline as other people often aren’t thinking of them because they’re typically not looking for solutions outside their immediate discipline.
Get started step by step. If solving a problem were easy, someone else would have likely already solved it. Every great thing is not born to be great, we can begin to do it with any ideas we think of no matter how poor it seems. And try to implement it, until we find some difficulty in the process. Then try to solve the specific difficulty and it will provide us with new discoveries and help us to understand the problem more deeply.
Communicate with others. Every researcher has her own idea even if it may not work at present. But what will happen if all the poor ideas are combined together? We can communicate to show every consideration and it can help to create a totally optimal direction to work on.