research

1. Research
Methodology
Dheeraj Singh negi 03/10/2014

3. Introduction
Research is composed of two words “re” and
“search”, which means to search again or it is a
careful investigation to understand or re-examine
the facts or to search for new facts or to
modify older ones in any branch of knowledge.
The term research is also used to describe an
entire collection of information about a particular
subject, but it is in general used by the students
of higher schools.

4. Research in common parlance refers to search for
knowledge; one can also define research as a
scientific and systematic search for pertinent
information on as specific topic. Some people
consider research as a movement, a movement
from the unknown to known. It is actually a
voyage of discovery. Thus research is an
endeavor to discover, develop and verify
knowledge.

6. First things

7. Basic steps of a research
project

8. Figuring out your study

9. Topic ideas
• E-book usage
• Usability studies of
– Online tutorial(s)
– ‘My Library” portals
• Analysis of library web sites or library
instruction sites or pathfinders by best
practices
• Student learning outcomes in LIS
programs

10. Research areas library and
information science

11. Analytical Bibliography
• Analytical bibliography is the study of physical
characteristics of books, manuscripts, maps, and other
written materials with the goal of shedding light on such
matters as the authenticity of individual items and the
chronology of different versions of particular works.
– Though the techniques of analytical bibliography were largely
developed in order to study books and manuscripts of
considerable age (e.g., early printings of Shakespeare's plays),
the techniques are applicable to materials of more recent origin.

12. Contd………
• Physical characteristics that can be
studied include:
– Paper and ink chemistry
– Watermarks
– Collation
– Binding
– Typefaces, even down to the level of
individual distinctive pieces of type
– Spelling variations

13. Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics
• First, a definition: "Bibliometrics is a type
of research method used in library and
information science. It utilizes quantitative
analysis and statistics to describe patterns
of publication within a given field or body
of literature. Researchers may use
bibliometric methods of evaluation to
determine the influence of a single writer,
for example, or to describe the relationship
between two or more writers or works."

14. Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics
• Laws of Bibliometrics. One of the main
areas in bibliometric research concerns
the application of bibliometric laws. The
three most commonly used laws in
bibliometrics are: Lotka's law of scientific
productivity, Bradford's law of scatter, and
Zipf's law of word occurrence."

15. Contd….
• Lotka's Law. Named after Alfred J. Lotka, this law "describes the frequency
of publication by authors in a given field." It states that in a given field the
number of authors who make n contributions to the field is approximately
1/n2 of the number who make a single contribution, and that the typical
proportion of those making just one contribution is about 60% of the authors
in the field. "This means that out of all the authors in a given field, 60
percent will have just one publication . . . 15 percent will have two
publications (1/22 times .60), 7 percent of authors will have three
publications (1/32 times .60), and so on." It can be shown that only about
6% "of the authors in a field will produce more than 10 articles" apiece.

16. Contd…..
• Bradford's Law. Named after Samuel C. Bradford, a British librarian,
"Bradford's Law serves as a general guideline to librarians in determining
the number of core journals in any given field. It states that journals in a
single field can be divided into three parts, each containing the same
number of articles: 1) a core of journals on the subject, relatively few in
number, that produces approximately one-third of all the articles, 2) a
second zone, containing the same number of articles as the first, but a
greater number of journals, and 3) a third zone, containing the same
number of articles as the second, but a still greater number of journals. The
mathematical relationship of the number of journals in the core to the first
zone is a constant n and to the second zone the relationship is n². Bradford
expressed this relationship as 1:n:n². Bradford formulated his law [in 1934]
after studying a bibliography of geophysics. . . . Bradford's Law is not
statistically accurate, strictly speaking. But it is still commonly used as a
general rule of thumb."

17. Contd……
– Zipf's Law. Named after George K. Zipf, a Harvard professor of
philology, this law describes the distribution of frequencies of words in
ordinary prose:
• Suppose that you have a reasonably lengthy text, that you count the
frequencies of the distinct words in the text, and that you then arrange the
distinct words in decreasing order of frequency. Next, you assign rank 1 to
the first word in the resulting list, i.e., the most frequent word; rank 2, to the
next most frequent word; rank 3, to the third most frequent word; and so on.*
• Zipf's Law says that the product of the rank of a word in this list multiplied by
its frequency will be approximately constant. That is, r x f = C, where r is the
rank of a word, f is the frequency of the word, and C is a constant. (C will
depend mainly on the size of the particular text you have counted, but
certain other characteristics of the text also help to determine C.)

18. Contd……
• Another important area of bibliometrics, Citation Analysis, "uses
various methods . . . in order to establish relationships between
authors or their work. Here is a definition of citation analysis, and
definitions of co-citation coupling and bibliographic coupling, which
are specific kinds of citation analysis."
– Citation Analysis. "When one author cites another author, a
relationship is established. Citation analysis uses citations in scholarly
works to establish links. Many different links can be ascertained, such
as links between authors, between scholarly works, between journals,
between fields, or even between countries. Citations both from and to a
certain document may be studied. One very common use of citation
analysis is to determine the impact of a single author on a given field by
counting the number of times the author has been cited by others. One
possible drawback of this approach is that authors may be citing the
single author in a negative context (saying that the author doesn't know
what s/he's talking about, for instance)."

19. Contd…..
– Co-Citation Coupling "is a method used to establish a subject
similarity between two documents. If papers A and B are both cited by
paper C, they may be said to be related to one another, even though
they don't directly cite each other. If papers A and B are both cited by
many other papers, they have a stronger relationship. The more papers
they are cited by, the stronger their relationship is."
– Bibliographic Coupling "operates on a similar principle, but in a way it
is the mirror image of co-citation coupling. Bibliographic coupling links
two papers that cite the same articles, so that if papers A and B both
cite paper C, they may be said to be related, even though they don't
directly cite each other. The more papers they both cite, the stronger
their relationship is.“

20. Contd….
• The best known facilitation of citation analysis is that of the
Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), which publishes several
citation indexes to journals in various fields.
– ISI’s Web of Science includes
• Science Citation Expanded
• Social Sciences Citation Index
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
– For I-School students, access to ISI journals is available through
UT-Austin Library Online (UTLOL), via “
Databases and Indexes to Articles”.
• Web Applications of Bibliometrics
– Cybermetrics. "Recently, a new growth area in bibliometrics has been
in the emerging field of webmetrics, or cybermetrics as it is often called.
Webmetrics can be defined as using of bibliometric techniques in order
to study the relationship of different sites on the World Wide Web. Such
techniques may also be used to map out (called "scientific mapping" in
traditional bibliometric research) areas of the Web that appear to be
most useful or influential, based on the number of times they are
hyperlinked to other Web sites."

21. Content Analysis
• In the social sciences and humanities, content analysis is the analysis
of texts of various types including writing, images, recordings and
cultural artifacts. Content analysis includes both qualitative and
quantitative approaches. Content analysis is used for a variety of
purposes including attribution of texts to authors, testing of
hypotheses, theory building, and evaluation research.
• In the social sciences, content analysis is a method for studying the
content of written texts and artifacts.[1] Earl Babbie defines it as "the
study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites,
paintings and laws".[2]
• Content analysis is a scholarly method in the humanities by which
texts are studied as to authorship, authenticity, or meaning.[3] This
latter subject includes philology, hermeneutics, and semiotics.

22. Historical Research
• Historical research is that which utilizes
historical sources like documents remains,
etc. to study event or ideas of the past
including the philosophy of the person and
groups at any remote point of time.

23. Stylostatistics
Using several stylostatistical techniques and employing
inferential statistical analysis, Mosteller and Wallace
were able to conclude, "In summary, we can say with
better foundation than ever before that Madison was
the author of the 12 disputed papers." Historians
have generally accepted the Mosteller and Wallace
findings as conclusive.
The Mosteller and Wallace book provides a brief history
of the Federalist Papers plus a masterful explanation
of stylostatistical techniques and their application to
the problem of uncovering the authorship of the
disputed papers

24. Conclusion
• The research projects are different from
that of academic research degree in
regards to different scale of time,
resources and extent, pioneering qualities
and rigor. Research project actually
involves a group work on a pre-assigned
topic by the funding agency; it has wide
scope in regards to the greater resource
availability.

25. • Thanks