Research Management
Just as I steer through Research, a 3 step process necessarily,
1. Searching
2. Reading
3. Writing
I understand the challenges faced by fellow scholars at the very first step. The quality of research depends on the quality of information accesible to students and the analytics performed on existing research to decide their topic / area of research. Whitepapers, Projects, Lectures, Conferences, Seminars, Journals, Bibliographies, State-of-the-art presentations, etc., are part of the process and only enhance the knowledge, only vital requirement for quality research.
Should we not have access to all research papers, in a database, that connects topics and contents?
Researchers could validate the output, and testify the correctness of such automatically generated bibliography as part of their course work. In this way, Research Management is tackled well, as a social responsibility, avoiding horrrendous waste of effort in duplicate research, and irrelavant reading, that is occuring all across the globe.
I found Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) to be the best vehicle so far. Google Scholar is definitely competing, but not close enough to MAS. I just hope, I will be able to use the MAS API to import the long list of a 1900+ papers on to my desktop in an excel file, to be able to do a state of the art on Temporal Databases. It will be the best way for me to understand the area thoroughly, to test my hypothesis to be in -line with current research and industry requirements, or it to be obsolete / duplicate / tested and tried already!
If I were asked to build an intelligent cralwer for research, I'd only say, I am far from it. Any researcher will quickly reckon with the need for the following -
1. Searching
2. Reading
3. Writing
I understand the challenges faced by fellow scholars at the very first step. The quality of research depends on the quality of information accesible to students and the analytics performed on existing research to decide their topic / area of research. Whitepapers, Projects, Lectures, Conferences, Seminars, Journals, Bibliographies, State-of-the-art presentations, etc., are part of the process and only enhance the knowledge, only vital requirement for quality research.
Should we not have access to all research papers, in a database, that connects topics and contents?
Researchers could validate the output, and testify the correctness of such automatically generated bibliography as part of their course work. In this way, Research Management is tackled well, as a social responsibility, avoiding horrrendous waste of effort in duplicate research, and irrelavant reading, that is occuring all across the globe.
I found Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) to be the best vehicle so far. Google Scholar is definitely competing, but not close enough to MAS. I just hope, I will be able to use the MAS API to import the long list of a 1900+ papers on to my desktop in an excel file, to be able to do a state of the art on Temporal Databases. It will be the best way for me to understand the area thoroughly, to test my hypothesis to be in -line with current research and industry requirements, or it to be obsolete / duplicate / tested and tried already!
If I were asked to build an intelligent cralwer for research, I'd only say, I am far from it. Any researcher will quickly reckon with the need for the following -
- Crawler / Bot - To create a list of papers, relevant publications from web-sites and search engines
- PDF Management Software - Extract text from PDF files (abstract, Title, Author, citations, bibliography, etc., even if not part of metadata)
- Document Management / Content Management Software (if the files included, are all not pdfs)
- Database / DBMS - My SQL / XML / Excel or even a .dat file will suffice.
- Reporting / Analytical Software - R / SAS / Excel ? - To present all possible information
- Other Nice to have features - Mind Mapping software, BibTex Generator, PDF to word converter, Software for Image extraction from PDFs (they're usually part of a PDF Management software), Reference and Citation Manager, Notes Management software will be of great help.
- Last but not the least, a giant Database like the MAS, with all the pre-work done regularly :) .. I know that is asking for too much, at the same time, it would also render research too easy and invaluable to the namesakers, if it weren't tasking us and demand that we read, which is a process only to generate high class research.
Monday, June 11, 2012
