Questions and Answers on Writing Activities and Reading and Research Skills

 

In our first class, I showed you around on the online course syllabus and in the Blackboard course website.
I am glad that several of you asked questions in and after class. Here, I would like to share the answers to these questions with you.

  1. How much do you have to write for the two papers and the weekly writing exercises?
    1. The requirement is 7 pages for the review paper and 12 for the research paper, which sounds much because 7+12=19, but the actual total number of pages of the two paper is 12 pages. Why? That’s because Paper 2 is based on Paper 1 which means 7 (they said) + 5 (I say) = 12.
    2. Weekly writing exercises 14 paragraphs, which include both new paragraphs that can be used for Paper 2 and revised paragraphs that can be used for both papers, which means 14 paragraphs = 0 paragraph in terms of the total number of 12 pages.
  2. How to get most relevant search results for my research project? How to effectively collect a batch of 10 good research papers for my research project?
    1. Use the extensive reading skills to read the general article about your research topic to get the general knowledge of your research project so that you become a somewhat knowledgeable person of the topic.
    2. Identify a topic for your research project according to your general reading.
    3. Formulate three related research questions.
    4. Use most relevant search words. These words come from your informed questions as a somewhat knowledgeable person of the topic.
    5. Try the searches in different databases, not just in one place such as scholar.google.com but also other databases such as sciencedirect.com to see the difference. sciencedirect.com is better than scholar.google.com according to my experience.
    6. Use keywords of each of the three research questions to search for papers in the research databases such as ScienceDirect.com, Scholar.google.com linked at the course website, on the bottom of the right hand menu.
    7. Use quotation marks for the key words. For example, solar energy in China without quotation marks/ solar energy in Germany without quotation marks will get you 55,828/ results in sciencedirect.com, but “solar energy in China”/ “solar energy in Germany” with quotation marks will reduce the number to 66/26.
    8. Use bookmarks or favorites functions to create a quick link on your web browser to the papers you find in order to get back to them quickly without repeating the same process you did the first time.
    9. Use the pre-reading and extensive skill to read the title, abstract, and the conclusion of each relevant research paper to see if the paper contains the information you need to answer your research question. At this stage (search instead of research), you don’t need to read the body of each paper yet as the purpose of this search is to find the right papers for your research project, not to research the views and findings of the research papers.
  3. What do you mean by using the extensive reading methods?
    1. Extensive reading means to read a lot of materials fast to get the gist and main value of the materials.
    2. Purposes:
      1. In research, it’s the researcher’s ability to select the best materials from hundreds of thousands papers on a particular topic to read more closely later.
      2. In your hectic daily life, it’s the person’s ability to select the most interesting materials to read intensively.
      3. In your future careered, it’s the ability to find the most pertinent materials for you, your boss or your team members to work on.
    3. Extensive reading for the research project:
      1. Refer to 2 for research above.
      2. Read the title of a paper, article, or book to see if the key words in the title deal with your research questions or take an informed guess if this work can help you with your research project.
      3. Read the abstract to see if your confidence in the paper, article, or book still holds.
      4. Read the conclusion to see if at least one of the three research questions can be answered by it.
      5. If your answer to the last question is yet, your extensive reading on this paper for your research project is done for the first two weeks.
    4. Intensive reading for weekly one paragraph exercise, weekly Blackboard reading reflection and class discussion, and research papers:
      1. Read the paper more closely.
      2. Read the definitions used in the paper/article.
      3. Read the cases presented carefully.
      4. Read the analysis of the cases.
      5. Read the views and findings so that you are able to compare them intelligently.
      6. Read one paper/article or part of a paper/article closely according to a particular issue so that you are able to complete each week’s one paragraph exercise.
      7. Read one paper/article or part of a paper/article closely so that you are able to complete weekly Blackboard reading reflection assignment and class discussion.
  4. How to get the access to publications that I find in research databases that require payments?
    1. If you see that you need to pay to get access to the full text of the paper, you need to login to the case.edu network.
    2. On campus, you need to log in CaseWireless and off campus, you need to log in Case VPN (download the VPN client software at http://vpnsetup.case.edu/).