In this new series of posts I want to help you become better researcher and a better student by sharing with you some of the strategies and research hacks I have picked up over my years of conducting academic research and teaching graduates and undergraduates.
In my own time as a student, PhD candidate, Junior Research Fellow and now a lecturer, I have come across and refined a number of methods and processes for working faster, smarter and more effectively. Some of them just speed up work I could have done anyway; some of them allow me to research in ways that simply would not be possible without them. Some are time-savers; some have been real life-savers.
In recent years I have been trying to find ways of systematically passing on these tips to my students, and these posts are an extension of that aim. I hope you find them useful.
This first of the research hacks is the “research audit” I get all my new Honours and graduate students to undertake.
What is a research audit?
When I start supervising a new Honours, Masters or doctoral students, I ask them to take an audit of their current research practices, to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and to isolate areas of research strategy on which they need to focus.
The audit falls into two parts: structure and strategy.
- Structure: How are you planning to structure your research project? What is it, precisely, that you are seeking to find out? Where do you want to end up, and how do you propose to get there?
- Strategy: How do you currently go about your research? What resources do you use? How do you organize yourself?
Why is it important to conduct a research audit at the beginning of a new project?
In my experience, strategy and structure are two of the areas most neglected by new research students.
- We can be so keen to get to the meat of a new research project that we don’t take time at the beginning to stop and think about how we are going to manage aspects of the research process like taking and retrieving notes, turning notes into arguments, or even reading our primary and secondary texts (it’s rarely a case of simply starting with the first word and reading through to the end).
- Similarly, we can dive into an area of research without a clear sense of what we are trying to argue, and then find ourselves drowning in a sea of information or being led down innumerable blind alleys and rabbit holes. Most of this frustration and time-wasting could be forestalled—and innumerable hours saved—by taking a little time at the beginning of the project to think about its structure.
So here is the first of my research hacks: the audit document I ask all my new research students to complete. It guides you through a series of questions that build up a picture of you as a researcher, your strengths and weaknesses, and your sense of the project upon which you are embarking. Before my first supervision with new students I ask them to email me a completed copy of this document and we discuss their answers, focusing on self-identified areas of weakness. Bear in mind that I mainly supervise topics in literary studies, philosophy, and film, so the questions are geared primarily at those research areas.
Download the document: Research Audit–Questions to ask as you set out to write a thesis.docx
What questions do you ask yourself when you are starting out on a new research project? Leave a comment below.
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