Worlds famous professor Stephen Hawking provides a definition for research as “No one undertakes research in with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before”. As he said research is about discovery/creation/identification of new things in any field. Before starting with your research information seeking is a paramount step for Ph.D. research scholars or other graduate students. Lets we see some necessary steps required before starting your research and sources for gathering information in the research process.
In starting you may focus on the own field of interest or abundant amount of idea and research domain. For confirming with your research domain evaluate recent research carried in the diverse field. Next stage, after research domain is narrow down specific research area since single research domain itself has a vast number of application, challenges, trends and so on. In this stage information, seeking/gathering is an important criterion for research students/scholars. Researcher/Student need to identify present process/research going on research area for that graduates/researcher can collect information from scholarly articles, journal papers, review papers, website sources, report, white paper and so on.
Once you identified the present research in selected field in next stage you need to identify research gap or limitation of research. To identify this recent research paper must be clearly evaluated and understand about techniques/method adopted and obtained results. At this time you must more conscious about a year of publication of research article. You need to evaluate the feasibility of research by research paper/journal/magazines and tool required. Even you can check whether hardware and software support is available in your college or university. After gathering all information about research field have a brief discussion with your guide/supervisor/ panel members; since they also provide some additional information regarding your research domain and feasibility by their experience/knowledge.
After confirmation with your guide or supervisor, you need to starts for gathering information about expected outcome and any financial support for your research. Once you all set start preparing for a presentation for that you collect information from websites, research articles, journals and white paper even you can refer government report based on your research area. After acceptance of your topic start your research and complete all in stipulated time since you already collected enough information about your research.