Scientific Method for Wikimedians/Research Questions

This chapter is the last chapter of part one "knowledge and the scientific method", when we finish this chapter we will move forward to part two "the research plan". In part one, we have covered four chapters:

We discussed in chapter one, knowledge in general, focusing on its types.
In Chapter 2, we took one specific type of the knowledge and discuss it in details, this type is the scientific facts. we explained: what it is, what are their types, simple and complex. How we create each of them. The creation of the scientific facts, require using methods and
The science that study the research methods is called methodology, which was the subject of the chapter 3 of this course.
In chapter 4, the last chapter we studied, we talked about one method used to create knowledge, and studied it in details. This method is called the scientific method. We found that the scientific method includes eight steps, and we discussed them in details and
In chapter 5, we will address only the first step of the method, "the research question".

This chapter includes five main points: 1. First we start by a reminder from the previous chapter of the structure of the scientific method. 2. After that, and before getting into details on the research question, we will present four major skills. You will need to develop, in order to clearly and easily define "a research question". They are:

first identifying the structure of a scientific work. Here you will learn how to recognize the major parts of a research work.
Second selective reading and there you will learn how to read a scientific work, searching for what do you need exactly.
Third Authority control it is an international system used to uniquely identify people and objects. such as, articles and journals and you will learn how to read and use identifiers created by this system.
Finally I will explain the card system, it is an old, but efficient way to organize the obtained knowledge, with all the tools in your hand you can start.

3. The third major point of this chapter where you will learn how you can search for a problem for your research. I will provide you with the list of possible starting points, where you can start your own research. 4. The fourth major part of this chapter is the properties of the research problem, and here you will study the problem itself as a subject, you will see that not all problems are suitable for your research. Sometimes, the problem is too complex. In other cases, there might be no enough time to address it completely, or simply the resources are limited. Maybe they are classified, so you cannot go further, although you have identified your problem. 5. Finally, we finish putting all what we have learned together, to create a global overview, on the research question.

Reminder: The scientific method

In the previous chapter, we have found that the scientific method has a cyclic structure with eight identifiable steps. they are:

defining the research problem: it is a question your research will try to answer, and please note that I used the word problem and not question, at this step it's highly probably that your understanding of the subject is still basic, and at a low level. So even if you arrive to create a question it's going to be modifiedm or Changed by the end of The Next Step which is:
The state of the art: in this step you need to search for the current Global achievements in regard to your problem, and it's likely that you will enlarge your understanding of the problem, and create a solid knowledge by the end of this step,
in the third step you will build a hypothesis a claim that might be an answer to the research question,
You need also to build a test or create a query with a set of expected results based on your hypothesis then you need to perform tests and collect results
In step 5 the collected data will be analyzed it might be exactly as you expected slightly different or completely out of the scope, in each case, you need to investigate why it is like this.
in The Next Step the sixth you need to decide what to do next based on the analyzes and several other factors such as budget and time. So either you go back to form a new hypothesis or maybe you go back further and look more into sources you might also go forward
to step 7. where you need to publish your work there is a complex peer review process, you need to follow we have discussed it in details in the previous chapter. and by the end of it your work will be published.
Other scientists can retest it, and start their own research based on it.

In this chapter and in the next, we will focus only on the first step. other steps will be completely covered in the next chapters up to the end of the course.

Regarding the first step, determining the research problem. We have built some basic knowledge. We agreed that it is where you need to define the problem, clearly and as much detailed as possible. The work at this step need to be based on others work, and you must not start from zero. In fact these emphasis the fact that the scientific method has a cyclic structure. Because step 8 retest is exactly where you get to know others work, and it is the step before defining the research problem. we also agreed that this is the hardest step of the method, that is because it needs large experience in the domain, and you simply might not have it. Yhat is why the role of a supervisor is important this step to orient all the research. Thus it has a large impact on the overall process.

Finally we presented a journalist Concepts that can help formulating the problem. It's called 5W1H where the 5Ws stands for what, when, why, where, and who. Wheras, H stands for How. again this is a journalist concept and it's not scientific but it is a useful tool helping you to formulate the problem.

Basic skills

These are some basic skills you will need in order to define the research problem easily. Before starting, I want to draw your attention that using these skills is not mandatory, and you can simply ignore them completely do it your own way, and you might arrive to good results.

However, these skills will make the process much more easier, and you will end gaining time and spend less efforts. We will address four skills in this chapter they are:

First you will learn how to address a research work well. I said work because it might be: a PhD thesis, a journal article, or simply a research report. Although they different in size, objectivem and creation process. The three have a major similarity, as they follow the scientific method strictly. they have similar structure resulted from following the same steps, and you will learn how to recognize this structure.
Second being able to recognize the structure, can be useful in selective reading. It is a way reading a scientific work used to get fast the major information that you might need in your research selective reading is essential if you want to save time and effort
Third we will talk about the authority control, it is a system used to uniquely recognize objects, or people. For examples books are identified using international serial book number (ISBN) it is a unique number assigned to an addition of the book to uniquely identify it if a book has two different Editions each one will have different ISBN. People also have their own identifiers such as International standard name identifier (ini) and scientific journals have also their own identifier International standard serial number (issn) and after you obtain this knowledge you will stop addressing works or people by names because this is misleading instead you will use unique identifiers instead
Finally with all that in mind you can use the card system it's a way to summarize what you have find it's flexible and enable you to create your own research question easily and if used with the authority control it can save time incredibly although the card system is considered all today, and there is software that can replace it completely I will insist on it. because if you learn how to use it you can easily use any software developed for this regard, but I cannot guarantee the opposite

Identify the structure of the scientific work

This part is an explanation for the structure of a journal article, which is the type that you mostly will find the structure of the thesis, or the research report might be slightly different. But if you understand the structure of the journal article, you will be able to detect the same parts in thesis and research reports.

1. The first part is the article title: it's usually one or two lines in length, the title also include major keywords, or subjects that the article covers. It is normally is located at the middle of the first page at the top.

2. The second part is the author information: it includes author name, its Institution, and the email address. some author do not like to use their real names and might use nicknames. it's completely fine. the author names create a problem, regarding the different in the way of writing the name. This is a problem when you want to identify all the works related to one person, or if you find their work, that you cannot directly linked to a specific person based only on the name. This problem will be addressed in the authority control section, later to be covered in this chapter.

3. The third part is the abstract: it is one paragraph at the top of the article that summarize the article as a whole. usually it follows the same structure of the article, with one or two sentences to cover each section of it. The abstract is essential part when you need to apply selective reading, as you will find later in this chapter.

4. Next you have the keywords: they are normally four or five words covering the major topics of the article, please note that not all articles include keywords, Some journals find them subjective and simply do not include them. Additionally normally there are no keywords in phases and research reports. Some journals includes also a footnote at the first page dedicated for funding information, as well as any conflict of interest declaration. Often this section is added to the end of the article.

5. The next section is the body of the article: It may include two columns, or one column, it depends on the style that the academic journal working on. This is only a question of style, and format. The body of the article includes several subsections that can normally follow the steps of the scientific method thus:

First you find a general introduction that covers the context of the article,
followed by the description of the problem. The body of the work might extend several pages, and a scientific article has normally at least two pages, and it can grow up to 20 Pages. however, exceptions for this case also exists.
The body of the article includes also a brief description of the research method, followed in this work, and how it was implemented to achieve results introduced in the article.
As well the results can include tables, or figures, and they are usually followed by analyzings that explain the findings, showing their importance or simply why they are far away, or too Close from the expected values.
Finally the article body ends with conclusion where the author reflects on the findings, and present his Future Works in this regard. clearly the structure of the scientific article follows the steps of the scientific method covered in the previous chapter.
The article can also include a short acknowledgment section after the conclusion, it is where the author shows he's grateful to people helped realizing his work.

6. Finally the article ends with a numbered list of references used in the article, the quality of the references is a major way to measure the quality of the whole article. An average Journal article can include up to 20 references, but this is no fixed number as some articles, especially surveys, might includes much more than 100 references, and that is completely fine. The sources will be covered in details in chapter 9 of this course, having all the knowledge on the structure of the scientific works can help a lot in the selective readings.

Selective reading algorithm

Please note that you cannot read all the works related to the subject you are studying. this is simply not possible due to the huge amount of Works available, and the limited time so you need to select only what is close to your research problem, and read it. to do that you need Follow The Selective algorithm reading:

First, you start searching, for example in a specific research engine such as Google Scholar using keywords related to your problem. The results will be a set of articles, maybe tenth or hundreds, the more you add keywords the more narrow your research will be.
You will start working on the resultsm usually Journal articles 6 to 10 pages each. And you need to start reading the abstractm and the keywords. to see if this article fits into your research or not. If not, you simply discard it. If it is, you can advance to the conclusion, and read it. to find what are the results of this work, if you find it interesting, you can go further and read the full paper. if not you can simply discard it.
Please note that you can always update your keyword lists based on the findings, to make your research as narrow as possible. This is a major objective, when you are working to define the research problem. Additionally, it is useful practice to search for other works for the same author if you find a paper that is really interesting for your research, it's highly probably that the author who published this paper, has also published other works regarding his research, where you might find interesting results on these other papers.

The Authority control

To understand this problem well you need first to see it solves, it's simply as the authors' names can be written in different ways. As we have discribed above, The article has a section for author's information, where authors can write their names in different ways, having My name as an example my first name is Michel, my last name is BAKNI. and my father's name is Nicola. according to this you can find below seven ways to write my name:

Michel BAKNI	Michel B.	M.Bakni	Michel N. Bakni
Bakni, Michel	B. Michel	Michel Nicolas Bakni

In fact, there is almost no limitation for what you can do here, and for not going far, this is the way of a name written using Latin scripts, other variations can exist in other writing systems, such as Arabic, Chinese, or others.

The same problem is present for book titles, article titles, and institution names. For example, if you search for a book titled: introduction to the scientific method, you will find several books that have the identical name, published in different years, in different places. and several books that has slightly different variations in naming. I think the problem now is clear.

Names, especially alphabetical are not a good choice for uniquely identify objects, thus, here where the authority control is giving its solution. It is a system of numerical and alphanumerical identifiers used to recognize objects uniquely.
Alpha numerical, means that the sample includes alphabetical letters and numbers. In fact, the use of this system is not limited to Scientific works, in the practical life, it is used in the car's registration plate for example, the same concept implemented, there is no unified system for application of the authority control. In fact you can create your own system, however there are several International systems recognized worldwide.

ISBN

The first one to cover is ISBN it stands for international standard book number It could be seen as a barcode on books, it's usually found on its back cover, ISBN is used to uniquely identify book Editions, this means all the books printed in the same edition for a given work. So, if there is two additions for the same work, they will have different isbn, this is also true for online edition and a hard Edition, the two types are considered different Editions. Thus, they will have two different isbn.

The ISBN control system was created in 1970, and it is accepted worldwide, thus, it's rare to see a published book today without an isbn. The system is managed by the international ISBN agency, which has several National branches in countries, and states worldwide.

an ISBN has 13 digits the last digit might be an X, it's also used here as a number to represent the number 10, in one single digit, as Roman used an X to represent 10. Until 2006, an ISBN has only 10 digits, but the system was extended since then and that's why you need to be ready for an ISBN with 10 digits. If you handle some old books please note that the digits of an ISBN are not randomly assigned.
The ID is divided into fifths that represents the country, the publisher, and the title. this is out of the scope of this course.

ISNI

The second identifier is the international standard name identifier or simply isni it's used to identify public entities, such as authors and publishers, but it can also used to identify journals. this identifier is, it was created almost 10 years ago in 2012 and it is getting popular since then. The system is managed by the isni international agency.

isni includes 16 digits, and as the ISBN, the x can be used to represent 10. the 16 digits are written in four groups each contains four numbers.

The third ID, is the virtual International Authority file normally abbreviated viaf it's mostly used to identify people. however, it's not only an authority control system. in fact viaf is a large database for National libraries identifiers. for example, it includes IDs from the library of the Congress, and from the isni database.

The system merge the two together under one file for the studied person. currently it's one of the most powerful tools to have for people's Authority control, their website is viaf.org, a

VIAF website

The main page of the viaf website where in the bottom, you can see the national libraries participating in this database, there is a small flag or icon that can be used to refer to the library. I will refer to two only because we will use them later.

First the flag of the United States of America, which represents the library of the Congress; Second the blue icon here which represents the isni control system.

The search bar is on the top of the screen, when writing in the search box a name, let's have "Barack Obama", as an example, then it has to press search button. It shows a several different results. then, by selecting the first one, it is shown that how the name is spelled is not important, this page links to all national libraries that have pages and identifiers for Barack Obama. Regarding of how the name is written, and you can see that even if the name is written in non-latin script, such as Hebrew and Arabic. There is no problem with that at all.

also it includes the identifier of the viaf system, if scrolling down a little bit, and put the mouse on the library of the Congress record, the ID of this library is displayed under the circle it reads its recording ID. The same goes for other identifiers and entries.

VIAF was created in 2003, it is managed by the online computer library center simply abbreviated to oclc as we have seen before, each author has a file, and these file has a unique numerical identifier that can includes up to 22 digit. These digits are automatically created and there is no specific hidden meaning, or fields in this ID.

ISSN

The final identifier we will study today is the international standard serial number or simply the issn, almost all serial publications today such as the scientific journals, has this unique identifier. This control system is old. It is dated back to the 1976, and it is managed today by the issn International Center.

The structure of an issn identifier is simple, it includes eight digits divided into two groups, each includes four digits the two groups are separated by a dash (-), the database is also available for public, so if you want to be sure that a journal exists really, and it is not a fruit. You can simply go to the website issn.org.

Card System

To put that together in the card system, first you need to understand why do you need this tool. In fact, when you start working on the definition of the research problem, you will deal with a large number of scientific works. It's normal that you will pass by 20 to 50 scientific works to clearly define the research problem, and the number can easily grow more dramatically. You will not use your own memory to remember, where you have read this piece of information? and How it was written exactly?

You need also to avoid doing the same research twice. For example, if you search for a definition for a given term, this might take 30 minutes, and you need to keep the information you have found with you, and not to redo the research again.

The next time, you need to use this term, and before we advance further I need to mention that, what you will learn to do next mainually is completely automated, today there is a specific family of programs called the reference management software. That can help you a lot in this regard, mainly or referencer are great examples, if you like to test this software yourself.

However, we will do it the old way, that is because I believe that, if you learn how to do it manually, you can easily learn how to use the software. I want to draw your attention that you need to be well organized. In fact, you need to be very well organized, in order to get the best out of this tool. In order to use this tool, you need small pieces of paper 15 by 10 centimeters, can be perfect, you can also use the Post-it cards.

We will have two types of cards: Reference and Quotation.

a reference card: It is used to store all the information on a specific scientific source, maybe a book or a journal article. The stored information, or the title author publication year. The most important is the ID of the work such as the ISBN. Each card also has a specific ID, and feel free here to be creative when constructing your own control system
The second type of cards is used to store a quotation, it includes a text quoted from a scientific work, as well as the reference ID, and the page number.
The reference ID, is the ID you have created for a reference card before. Each quotation card should also have its own ID, so you can easily refer to it, and let us have an example to make the use of the tool clip.

I think you remember the definition of science, we have shown in previous chapters. I am putting it on the screen, and now let's see how a reference card. The first note that the card ID is R15, where R stands for reference, the card includes also other information related to the book such as title, author, and the ISBN.

A typical card can also include the type of the work, which is a book, and the name of the publisher.

The quotation card, has the ID Q3 where Q stands for quotation, the quotation is written on the card, as well as the page, where the original text was taken from 15. In this case, note that the reference ID of the quotation card is R15, which is the ID of the reference card. We have defined before.

Searching for a problem

We can move forward to section three, where we will discuss how you can search for a research problem. In fact, there are several ways to do that.

It is important that you do your own research, on what you think is the problem. Personally, I think this is essential, when you do your first research.

It's highly probably that you will arrive to nothing clear, and you will stay far away from the objective. However, you will start understand what are the main issues, or problems in this domain, and even more importantly, what is the terminology used?

A good starting point is Google Scholar, it is a generic research search engine, when you become familiar with the domain of research you are working with. You will discover other more specific search engine, so what you need to do is to describe, what you think is the problem, using three or four words search for them, and start reading.

It is essential at this point, to use both selective reading, and the card system, we have explained. the two previously in this chapter. Selective reading helps you not reading everything you find. The card system helps you organize the obtained knowledge in your research.

You need to focus on two parts of the scientific works you are dealing with:

First, the Keywords part, which helps you narrow the research, it's logical that the domain of research is wide, large, and one of your objective is to make it as narrow as possible.
Second, there are References but it helps you widen the research, sometimes you need to go in the opposite way. For example, when you start your own research, it's important that you go wide first. Don't get confused on going narrow or wide.

The diamond model shown on figure x, can describe this issue visually. When you start looking for something new, like the problem itself, or a new concept. You find while you are looking in scientific works, you need to start wide first, then when you have collected enough information, and you have understand the context, you can scope down and focus on the definition of the problem, or of the term.

Unfortunately, there is no exact definition for the turning point, it's completely practical, the more you practice this method, the more you become familiar with it, and gain experience on when you should stop widen research and tighten it.

There are several ways that can help you define the research problem easily.

they are based on communication. Each company or enterprise, including Wikimedia Foundation, has a research and development team. A good practice is to write them an email, asking about a specific problem have they addressed it. You can also propose your findings in this regard, suggesting that you can provide help.
Second, write down the same for public or private research institutions, especially institutions engaged in finding solution to the problem you are addressing. They might be looking for someone to contact the research.
Third, write down for other researchers or experts. who are working on the subject you can ask questions on what you have find, if you like, and not only asking for help defining the problem. Authors contact information are found in a specific part in the scientific works, we have addressed it in details previously in the chapter 4, you can always find open questions in the conclusions part of scientific works.
Conferences related to your problem is a great place where people meet and discuss, if you can attend one, this will help you formulating your research problem. If not, you can check the publication of the conference, it is where all the ideas discussed in the conference can be found in a written form. If you get any open question there, be aware that you are starting the scientific method, previously discussed in chapter 4.

as you can find above in three out of four propositions, you need to write a message or an email, in order to communicate. Thus, you need to be extra formal clear and well specified way of communication. The email should start with self introduction, with providing some links of the work done by you if available. Secondly, the objective of the message, clearly and briefly, as much as possible. Finally, adding different ways of communication with you, including email address, phone number, and postal address. These are some general nodes you need to keeping in mind, while defining your research problem:

First, it is a long way and you need to be patient, defining a good research problem, is not something you can do in a week, be suspicious to work fast, and easy ways. they are misleading, and you will end finding problems in your problem.
Second, you need to be well organized and manage your time well, so you can save efforts and reduce any possible costs to their minimum. Being well organized is essential if you want to do research.
Third, you need to read a lot, having general knowledge in the domain where your problem is located, helps you go easily into details in any specific way, in that domain. Additionally having this knowledge, can help you avoid going in debt and drones, or propose naive ideas not comfortable with the current findings in that domain. You need also to be critical, as much as possible, always ask questions on how, and why others have defined their problems in this specific way.
As we have mentioned before, the scientific method include communication part, it's very helpful to contact others asking for their scientific opinions on a specific matter. In fact, having a good contact network is an advantage in this regard.

Research problem properties

In this section, we will discuss the problem itself as a subject. You can think of this section as a general consideration. You need to keep in mind that every time you are working on defining a research problem, you can transform these consideration into a checklist. So you can use it easily, you need to keep in mind, that you are responsible for your research.

If you are blocked in the middle of your research for any reason related to what we will discuss later, the responsibility is completely on you. I'm not saying that to make you feel afraid, but my objective is to make you aware that you need to consider also several things, not directly related to the problem itself, Also, you need to be well organized to address this.

To move into the aspects of research problem, there are:

First, the status of the problem, this means what is the current achievement in this regard globally.
Second, the size of the problem where you will learn what is considered important to make the problem well defined.
Third, the availability of tools and sources you will use in your study.
Finally, false the steadyability of the problem, it means how to determine if you can study the problem or not.

The status of the problem

It means what is the current states of the problem, we have said before that creating scientific knowledge is a continuous process, and it is open.
So it is likely that someone has thinked exactly as you, and address the problem. Thus you need to check what is new regarding this problem, and you have four possible answers you need to react differently:

1. first, the problem is solved, and you can now check the solution and test it yourself. Do not try to solve the problem again from zero, in this case you can do one of the following:

first build new problem based on the new findings.
Second enhance the solution by trying to achieve the same results in an optimized way,
Or simply in the third option, you can ignore the problem and search for another one.

2. the second possible answer is that you might find someone working on the problem, but still have not yet solved it. Here, it is a tricky situation, because ideally you should contact him/her asking for an abstract of findings. You might simply get a negative answer, or no answer at all. But if you get a positive one, this can help you formulate your problem better. keep an eye on the publications of this researcher, if you decide to work on this problem, they might be great useful for you.

3. the third possible answer, there is no solution based on our current and knowledge. Here you need to test the proof yourself, if valid , you need to find another problem.

4.The fourth answer, is that the problem is still open, with no solution. This means that you can try to solve it your own scientific way.

size of the problem

The second property we have to address is the size of the problem, it means you need to choose a problem, that can be solved in your current capacity. That is why it's very important to define the problem well, you need to consider how much time you have, and how much time the application of the scientific method might take. This is hard to be done alone, and you might need to ask experts in the domain, they can estimate the time you might need with a small margin of error.
This is another proof, that the communication is very important, when you are applying the scientific method.
Finally, you need also to check for the cost, for example, you might need money to buy materials for tests. This is essential, because if you are out of the budget, you cannot buy new materials, and probably you need to adapt. Sometimes that can affect directly the researcg, also, you need to consider needing to traveling in some cases, where you need to do tests, or maybe access specific resources, or simply attend scientific conferences. All of these need to be considered, when you define your research problem.

Availability of tools and sources

the third property is the availability of tools and sources, you will need to perform your study, regarding the research problem from the tools perspective. There might simply no available tools. Forget not, that we are limited technologically, and your hypothesis might need tools to be tested, and simply this tool does not exist.
Another possible scenario, is that the tool exists, you can simply not access it, because it's not open for public.
Regarding the sources, you need to consider two different aspects related to their availability:

First, Are the sources open?
This means, that you can access them freely. Some sources are not, and you need to pay a fee to access them, and this will add additional cost you need to consider in your budget. When mentioning "open", it means without fee, however, some sources might not be open, in different way, but they might be classified by governments. Thus, the access is restricted, and you need to keep that in mind too.

Steadyability of the problem

the fourth property is the Steadyability of the problem, it means the possibility for you to study the problem, which you are defining. There are several aspects you need to consider in this regard:

1. First, is it safe to perform the study?
this can be understood in two different ways;

The first, is related to natural causes. for example, if your study is taking place in an isolated island, or top of volcano, or deep in the ocean. you need to consider safety.
The second type of causes, is related to the human factors and other parties that might be affected by by your study, and they will not like you to do it. for example, a government that is trying to hide something or a criminal group or even a political or religious party, all of these might not be happy of you doing your study, you need to be careful here, and the study who has interest in the problem, you are studying, and what can they do, and if they simply like, or don't like what you are doing. You might also need help from others in some domains, experience is essential, and if the experience is not available in terms of people, who can guide the research the problem might not be steadyable

2. the second point might be strange, but it is real. In some cases, you need to know specific languages and without that the problem, cannot be addressed well. if most of the sources the studied problem are written in a specific language, You need to know that language, as an example, In other cases, the language might be spoken, if you want to do interviews with people speaking a specific language, it's super important that you master that language, as using translation, you will always lose a part of the meaning, and in research this lost part is essential.

3. finally you need to keep a natural point of view, regarding the studied problem. Thus, if you have an opinion that might interfere with your logic, and judgment. The problem is not suitable for you, and this can be true in several fields, including politics, economics, religious, and even in supportive subjects.

Notes on the research problem

Briefing all what is written above, and to finish the chapter, First, and most importantly defining the research problem, in the majority of cases, the first step applying the scientific method, We also said that, it is the hardest step, and it is difficult to do it alone, that is why you need help from experts to perform it. We also insisted on the need of the researcher, to be well organized, in addition to master a set of skills, that can make the mission much more easier, where we described four skills they are, identifying the structure of scientific works, selective reading, understanding and use the authority control systems, and use of the card system.

The article also shows how to use them together to make the best out of the process, we also talked about the cases, when doing the research to define the problem, the needing to go wide to get the context, and then to focus down on the problem, and then the turning point, is very important and the only way to know when to turn is obtainable, by practice.

Finally, Some considerations to be aware of when defining the research problem, the considerations were presented in four properties, they are; the status of the research problem, the size of the research problem, the availability of tools, and sources, finally, the study ability of the problem. and here you have it the research question this is the end of the theoretical part of chapter 5. at the end of part one in total the research question will also be addressed in more details in chapter 6 which is the first chapter of the part two in this course.