MRE1x_2020_Module_2_2a_Desktop_research_and_secondary_research-video

Desktop Research and Secondary Research, Starting to understand your research in context. So what is desktop research? You can start your research journey on several starting points going to the library, using a search engine, starting to look in online databases, a lot of the questions at the beginning are around defining your terms and collecting examples of related work.

This is a basic exercise to, on the one hand, learn about the methodology,  but also understand your topic at hand. So the classical definition of secondary research, you can see here from Wikipedia, some secondary research involves the summary, collation and/or synthesis of existing research. Secondary research is contrasted with primary research in that, primary research involves the generation of data, whereas secondary research uses primary research sources as a source of data for analysis.

So an important point is you try to understand the existing body of knowledge and the existing evidence at hand and try to classify that, identify gaps. And of course, for that you need to understand the terms that are spoken in the research field specific to your research question and study. So what does it mean to understand the context and identify these terms and what is important about it?

Let me give you an example also. We worked a lot on augmented reality. So starting questions are why is it important to perform this research?

What are we expecting? What kind of new insights is it that we want to understand what has not yet been explored? You can also start from the areas when you look at technologies where these technologies have been applied already.

Is there proof that these technologies work or is there any other kind of evidence to understand your research domain and your research field? So when we stick with the example of augmented reality, defining the terminology, you will be confronted with articles looking at augmented reality, virtual reality. You can collect examples where people try to experiment with different types of applications of the technology.

And you should probably approach these also considering the added value and motivation behind augmented reality. And what was the purpose that these experimenters, the researchers actually originally had? So also exploring the context will help you to understand the current state of the technology, what is possible, what is not possible, and so on.

So as I mentioned at the beginning,  there are there are many starting points for desktop research, but where should you start to look? So first of all, the important step is finding different sources of information. So identify a range of sources, identify different sources you could make use of and use different type of queries.

So just experiment with the terms you start your journey with and type them in a search engine and identify the number of hits you'll find and try to combine  different search queries. So also use simple search queries, combinations of that. We come to that also a bit later.

Another important issue is to keep a record of your results, keep a log book, you can do this in a simple text document, you can do it in a more advanced spreadsheet. You will also see examples of that. But it is important to document your journey because for later on in the publication, this data is very valuable also to see how your terminology developed and you can use that in your publication.

So in that sense, also, if you come across milestone conferences with a lot of citations, important publications also for you personally, keep them in your log file. And do iterations about that so regularly revisit your log file, your documentation and reflect on the terminology you're using and this is the appropriate terminology. So if necessary, revise your terms and relate to the sources where you found these definitions.

So there is, as I said, a variety, you can start in a dictionary, search in Wikipedia use search engines, typically if you have a more scientific approach where, you know, already there is an existing body of evidence and existing body of research, go to your library catalog, you will find selected. Areas and indices for different areas, so also in some domains, it's very valuable to look at venues and conferences held about the topic because this is also state of the art research regularly that is only accepted to these venues. So that conference proceedings are definitely a very good starting point.

Also, to understand your domain at hand. So search terms, I come to that in more depth also in the literature review, but as I mentioned before, work was simple and or more complex searches. So combine and-or-not queries.

And we will see an example of that later on. Work with different keyboards typically start to search for title, keyword, abstract so you don't do a full text search because that becomes much more complex. Do a quick scan and take short notes on findings that strike you.

So and iterate about your results, as mentioned before. I give you one example of some also additional information you can get from these queries and searches, I stick with the domain of augmented reality. So this is a search from Google scholar.

Interesting observations you can make is by how many authors has an article be cited? So you see the first one, a survey of augmented reality  has site has been cited eleven thousand times, which in is actually a pretty high number. Depends on the domain of course, it's already also from ninety seven.

OK, there are different versions of that, but you can. - That definitely seems a milestone paper to understand your topic. And then you have specific applications in education in this case or other applications.

So a lot of like review studies help you at the beginning also to understand your domain. Second, in some cases it's really interesting to look at the distribution of publications over the years, which also comes back into your literature review then. So, for example,  here you can see that a lot of publications have been done already in 2017.

If you would go back in time, probably you would see increasing numbers as the topic gets more popular. But sometimes you also see wave distributions of hype cycles going back and forth on the topic. So distribution over time, this is from Scopus, you can definitely get some interesting insights.

And last but not least, and I mentioned that in the sources, venues are important, so to define the terminology here, you can find an international symposium on augmented reality. You see different application  domains and workshops on those. And it definitely makes sense to look at the summaries and  overviews of these conference publications, conference proceedings to understand what is going on considering the state of technology.

Last but not least: Be aware when you search  for terms of a bubble, so also use probably different search engines, you might be find it very interesting when you search terms and you use the same search terms and different search engines. Also, be aware of when you logged into certain tools as Google. Of course,  your profile determines also what you will find.

So use also logged out searches where you don't have a specific user profile with your history that can give you really new perspectives on the topic. So to sum up: Think about the purpose. What is it, what you're actually searching for and then come back to that later on, try to understand the terminology, the state of art and the context of application, where your research topic has been applied, use databases, Google and be aware of the bubble,  use so different search engines, so search for simple terms and complex combinations of terms.

And last but not least, very important, document your explorations in a logbook and regularly reflect on your log book. I wish you success.