Research project template

This is a template for research projects.

Fill in sections Introduction, Related work, Methods, and Experiments before writing any code/running any experiments.

If you use this template, please include a link to the license, for example by including the following Markdown snippet:

This `README` was adapted from [`github.com/jakelevi1996/retempl`](https://github.com/jakelevi1996/retempl) ([license](https://github.com/jakelevi1996/retempl/blob/main/LICENSE)).

This README was adapted from github.com/jakelevi1996/retempl (license).

Significant credit is due to my PhD supervisor Professor Mark van der Wilk for encouraging me to internalise these thought processes.

Credit is also due to an old Tweet from @AdrianoAguzzi explaining what a good Discussion section looks like (although that Tweet appears to no longer exist, so it's good that I took notes).

Before asking any research questions, it is sensible to do some research about what makes a good research question. For example, a research question should be focused, specific, complex, feasible, and important to you and others.

A popular framework for goal-setting in general (which is relevant to asking research questions) is SMART, which recommends that a goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Megan A. K. Peters wrote an article in Nature Human Behaviour called How to develop good research questions, arguing that the common adjectives clear, focused, relevant, novel and tractable are insufficient, and that research questions should be driven by enthusiasm, through a process containing 4 phases and 4 traps:

• Phases:
  • Phase 1: a self-critical brainstorm
  • Phase 2: building context and connections
  • Phase 3: distilling to the essence
  • Phase 4: the final product
• Traps:
  • Trap 1: the ‘hypothesis requirement’
  • Trap 2: excessive attachment to your question(s)
  • Trap 3: ‘oh no, someone already had my idea!’
  • Trap 4: the ‘hammer and nail’ trap

Contents

• Research project template
  • Contents
  • Research questions
  • Introduction
  • Related work
  • Methods
  • Experiments
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Future work

Research questions

1. ...

Introduction

• What problem are you trying to solve?
  • ...
• Why is the problem important?
  • ...
• What's missing from existing understanding/solutions?
  • ...
• What are the main challenges?
  • ...
• What is a high-level outline of the method?
  • ...
• What are the contributions, and how are they new?
  • ...
• Why are the contributions important?
  • ...
• What is the scope/limitations of the project?
  • ...

Related work

• Which research themes are most relevant to the research questions?
  • ...
• What are the most relevant papers in each theme?
  • ...
• How can these papers be used to argue that the research questions are necessary?
  • ...

Methods

• ...

Experiments

• What is the minimal sequence of experiments necessary to convincingly and quantitatively answer the research questions?
  • ...

Results

...

Discussion

• What is the meaning and significance of the results?
  • ...
• What is the answer to the research questions?
  • ...
• How do the results relate to existing work?
  • ...
• What are the limitations of the current approach?
  • ...
• What is the potential future impact of the results?
  • ...

Future work

• ...