Questions& Answers for Research Methodology Exam

(Dr. Amir Hossein Sari)

1. What is research?
It is defining and redefining problems, formulating the hypothesis for suggested solutions,
collecting, organizing and evaluating data, making deductions and reaching conclusion

2. What is the difference between basic research and applied research?

Basic research is fundamental research without immediate need and practical applications.
But applied research tries to solve an immediate specific problem faced by industry or society.

3. What are the phases of research?

Selection of domain, identification of keywords, literature review, Redefining research problem,
preparing research proposal, identifying variable/parameters, Data collection and representation,
Testing, comparing results, report writing

4. “Research objectives should be SMART”, What does it mean?

Objectives should be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound

5. What are some of the Good literature sources?

Conference Proceedings, Dissertation Reports, Research Reports, White Papers, Patents, Reviews,
Textbooks, Hand Books, Encyclopedia

6. What is hypothesis?
Answer to the research questions before starting and doing the research.

7. What are the sections of research proposal?

Introduction, Literature Survey, Motivation, Research Statement, Objectives, Techniques, Expected
Outcomes, Plan, References.

8. What are the sections of Report Writing?

Abstract, Introduction, Review of Literature, Problem Definition and Objectives, Methodology,
Observations and Results, Discussion, Summary, Conclusion, Publications, References,
Appendixes
9. What are the most important factors affecting the choice of a particular method for
data collection?
Nature, Scope and objective, budget, time, …

10. What are the examples of plagiarism?

The copying words or sentences of the other work in our work without citing, crediting their work
and claiming as own and failing to put in marks or giving incorrect information about the source of
a quotation, changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source or copying so many
words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or
not, are all examples of plagiarism.

11. What are the choices for research publications?

12. What are the main body of a research report and thesis?
Reports and theses are broadly categorized in to three parts
(i) Preliminary pages include:
Title page, declaration by researcher, certificate by supervisor, abstract, table of
contents, list of figures, list of tables, symbols, acronyms, and their meanings.
(ii) Main body of the theses includes:
The body includes following elements: Introduction, Literature survey, Methods used and
proposed algorithms, Results, Discussion, Conclusions
(iii) Acknowledgments and reference material
It includes these elements: Acknowledgments, Bibliography, Appendixes

13. What is the Journal IF (Impact Factor)?

The journal Impact Factor (IF) is revealed each year by Thomson Reuters (now owned by Clarivate
Analytics). The factor may be a quantitative relation of total range of articles cited in the last two
years and total range of articles published in the last two years. If 2017 is the current year, then
journal impact factor of 2017 is calculated by the formula:
Journal Impact factor = [Citation 2016 + Citation 2015] / [Publications 2016 + Publications 2015]

14. What are the most preferred Citation Index and Search Engines?
1. SCOPUS is possessed by Elsevier. SCOPUS is a bibliographic database of peer reviewed literature
containing scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.
2. Science Citation Index (SCI) is a reference record initially delivered by the Institute for Scientific
Information (ISI) and made by Eugene Garfield. It is presently owned by Clarivate Analytics.

15. What are the H Index and I10 Index?

The h-index is a metric for evaluating scientist’s personal performance based on publication and
citation. It calculates scientist’s performance primarily based on their profession publications, as
measured through the lifetime wide variety of citations each article gets.
I10-index : The I10 index refers to the number of paper with 10 or more citations and is created by
Google Scholar.

16. What are the list of citation index and search engines?
○ Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)
○ Science Citation Index (SCI)
○ Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
○ Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)
○ CiteSeer
○ IEEE Xplore
○ Scopus
○ Springer Link
○ Web of Science
○ PubMed
○ Google Scholar
○ Indian Citation Index
○ CNKI Scholar
○ Science Direct
17. What are the type of plagiarism?
A. Plagiarism of Words (The Ghost Writer)
B. Stitching Sources (Potluck Plagiarism)
C. Patchwork Plagiarism
D. Self-Plagiarism (the Self-Stealer)
E. Cyber and Digital Plagiarism
F. Accidental Plagiarism
G. Plagiarism of Authorship
H. Plagiarism of Ideas
I. Reuse of Programming Code

18. What is the plagiarism of words?

The writer copies every single word from the source without use of quotation mark, citation,
acknowledgment, or attribution.

19. What does Stitching Sources (Potluck Plagiarism) mean?

The internet is flooding with large amount of informative data from numerous sources that are
readily available for use. Writer tries to fetch essential and appropriate content by copying from
several different sources. Modifying and stitching the relevant contents from various documents,
books, online sources, web pages and repositories to make them fit together and look appropriately
linked leads to potluck plagiarism.

20. What is Patchwork Plagiarism? Give an example.

Such plagiarism occurs when we borrow the content from original source and weaves them into
our paper without citing. Here sources are used more than one like above. Suppose a student obtain
four sources from where he/she copied one sentence from A source, one sentence from B source,
one sentence from C source and one sentence from D source, and so on. Here the student thought
that they are not copying anything and even they cited the references of sources. But still this is
plagiarism due to unorganized and not composed sentences they used in their work. In such a case,
direct quoted words should be cited with quotations.

21. What are Backward and Forward reference search?

In backward reference search we can choose the latest article from the reputed journal written
by good researcher and study all related references of that paper. In Forward reference search we
can also find the important old article in the domain and find all the papers that referred the article.
22. What are three important steps for literature survey?
(1) by using keywords we download ~100 research papers from good ISI published papers related
to research topic.
(2) we initially read only title, abstract and conclusion of each research paper and decide whether it
is related to research topic. If yes, we include it to our list, else skip it. From this step we will get to
know what has been done in this area and what can be done in future.
(3) We read shortlisted papers in detail and start taking notes of different parameters considered,
methodologies used, conclusions derived, and related mathematics/theories used.

23. What should we know after literature survey process?

We should able to identify the top 10 researchers in our domain. We should find good universities
where people are working on the same or similar problems. We should provide main focus on
comparing the approaches, Identifying the weaknesses and strengths in recent research articles in
the subject.

24. What is the Research Proposal?

Researchers should able to convince people for selected topic and objectives through the research
proposal. It is very important document that is reviewed by different committees. Research
proposal is mandatory document to be submitted to the university. University has its own research
proposal format.

25. What are the objective of the proposed research?

It should be clearly indicating the perception of the research work and should not be a mere
repetition of the topic of research. What is to be achieved as an outcome of the research has to be
visualized while mentioning the objective of the research. Objectives should be given pointwise.

26. How should we write the Methodology of proposal?

Methodology should provide experimental/infrastructural/computing facilities needed to carry
out the research work and it should be described in the logical phases that are used to investigate
the identified research problem. There should be a phase wise description with a brief
explanation under each phase. The methods and approach can also be represented by figures and
flowcharts.
27. How can we select appropriate method for Data Collection?
Nature, Scope and objective, budget, time, …are the most important factors affecting the choice
of a particular method. The reliability can be tested by finding out the following: Who collected
the data? What were the sources of the data? Were they collected by using proper methods? At
what time were they selected? What level of accuracy was desired? Was accuracy achieved?
28. What are some reasons for selecting particular research topic?
A. the topic is of our interest
B. our research supervisor is expert in that domain and working on some related project
C. we have identified the gap in the literature
D. the topic has very good future prospects

29. Please write an example for a research tentative plan.

30. Choose 2 titles from your HomeWorks (as written bellow) and explain them.
(Just in maximum 5 lines explain each title)
A. Impact factor/Quality Factor
B. Google Scholar
C. Wikipedia
D. Open Access Journal
E. SCI/ ISI
F. WoS and Scopus
31. What are the parts of a research paper?
Title, Authors name and affiliation, Abstract and keywords, Table of contents, Introduction,
Methodology and proposed algorithm/ Experimental and Setup, Results and discussions,
Conclusion, References, Appendices

32. Explain the full paper

The page length of these articles is typically 4 - 6 printed pages. It requires sufficiently high quality
of the paper, representing the novel methodology and execution of the work It presents novel
results, fulfilling the expectations of the reviewers and editors with expertise and awareness of
recent trends in that domain. It requires significant contributions in comparison with reported
literature
33. What is Letters/rapid communications/short communications?
They are quick and early communication of significant and original advances. They are much
shorter than full articles:
• They have short page length
• The review time is less as compared to a full-length article
• They usually require original results with significant change in the technology
• Routine small incremental results are not suitable for this letter category of publication

34. What are Review papers/ perspectives?

They detail the ongoing developments since the origin of the problem and summarize reported
results. It is not a platform to introduce new information. Review papers provide a comparison of
two or more theories and evidence of each work. They should also provide development of new
tools, methods, and theories. Work should also compare various methodologies for same problem
with their pros and cons. A novel insight gained from a wider view of recent progress on a topic, or
the recognition of a critical new problem or issue previously unnoticed. A controversy: two or
more camps with competing theories or explanations of a phenomenon, with evidences.

35. What is the Plagiarism of Ideas?

Using and presenting somebody else’s idea as your own and taking away all the
credit without any reference to the original idea and also submitting a paper by
incorrectly citing another’s ideas. This is where the student uses one of the following
as the basis for the whole, or a substantial part, of the assignment:
• published or unpublished books, articles, reports, or magazines
• some resources from the Internet
• some sort of ideas pitched in a TV program or a radio program
• an essay from an essay bank
• a piece of work previously submitted or to be submitted by another student
• from any newspaper article
• from an unpublished manuscript or record book

36. What are the Reasons for Plagiarism?

A) Most popularly reported reason, people plagiarize is the human nature of
procrastination. People tend to postpone the expected and inevitable
tasks/assignments/ exercises until the last minute. This leaves them very limited time
before the deadline and therefore important issues like integrity of the content are
paid meagre attention. Sometimes procrastinators recurrently and deliberately look
for justification for adjourning the work and avoid it. It is a short-term panic
response that in the long run reflects their perpetual struggle against themselves,
their indiscipline, and sometimes their hidden fears, thwarting their career paths.
With consistent efforts, it is possible to overcome the habit of procrastination and
ensurethe integrity and honesty in the assigned work and contributions.
B) People lack knowledge about proper citations. People end up casually using
readily available information in the electronic documents or pages on the Internet
and other sources without seeking their permission and acknowledging or citing the
source. Response to loads of information available at their fingertips, which can be
comfortably replicated/duplicated, also leads to plagiarism.
C) Students are not fully aware about plagiarism and they do not fully understand
the conventions required in the academic/scientific/technical/non-technical writing.
D) At some instances, people are overconfident about their skill set and believe they
can escape and get away with plagiarism. They are comfortable to plagiarize when
they realize that the content was not submitted to plagiarism detection tools or not
uploaded on other internet sources.
E) Sometimes negative emotions and competitive urges to gain the credits for the
module without sincerely working enforce conscious decision of plagiarizing on the
students.

37) What should be in the research design of proposal (give an example)?

The researcher should identify all related variables or parameters.
Parameters can be identified during literature survey and it may vary depending on
the proposed hypothesis.
In hypothesis “Illness of children occurs mainly due to change in season, ”
parameters can be age, whether ill, duration of illness, type of illness, season during
illness, weight, height, temperature, and so on.
The research design is a systematic plan designed to obtain a solution to the research
problem. Which data should be tested, which procedure/algorithm/methodology will
be applied is decided in the design phase. Research design should be carefully
planned and checked for feasibility
38) What should be take care in Selection of Appropriate Method for Data
Collection?
Nature, Scope and objective, budget, time, …are the most important factors
affecting the choice of a particular method. The reliability can be tested by finding
out the following:Who collected the data? What were the sources of the data? Were
they collected by using proper methods? At what time were they selected? What
level of accuracy was desired? Was accuracy achieved?
Tabulation is a process that conserves space and reduces explanatory and descriptive
statement and also provides the comparison from one state to another.
Tabulation also provides various statistical computational information, which
facilitates the summation of items and detection of errors and omission.