How to do good research

by Gregor v. Bochmann, School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa
(This text was prepared in October 2009 at the Hunan University of Science and Technology in Xiangtan, China)

Criteria for funding research in Canada: the most important source of funding for university-based research in computer science is the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)

How to do good research : Important points (overview)

  1. Choose an interesting area for research
  2. Identify an interesting research topic (a problem for which there is no good solution)
  3. Have some good idea how to improve the state of the art
  4. Show that your idea works: e.g.
  5. Do a systematic comparison with other approaches to the same problem and discuss advantages AND disadvantages of your approach
  6. Write up your results in some papers which make these results accessible to the interested expert.

How to do good research : more details

  1. Choose an interesting area for research
  2. Identify an interesting research topic (a problem for which there is no good solution)
  3. Have some good idea how to improve the state of the art
  4. Show that your idea works: e.g.
  5. Do a systematic comparison with other approaches to the same problem and discuss advantages AND disadvantages of your approach
  6. Write up your results in some papers which make these results accessible to the interested expert.

How to write a good research paper

There are a number of interesting articles on the Internet about this topic. I made copies of those articles I found most interesting (among those that I found with Google).