How to start your research?

Speaking truly - when you get enrolled in a Ph.D. program, you just entered a dark road and your Ph.D. guide is your torchlight. Sometimes you are enough lucky to get a good torchlight (I mean guide) who will really guide you through the way and let you reach the destination (which is your Ph.D. degree). But, in many cases, this is not the case and basically, you have to work independently. Your guide will be just for signing your forms and other formalities (and also for imposing various constraints upon you making your things difficult). This fact can be verified if you ask those who completed or presently doing Ph.D. As I told in a previous post - my work was an experimental work and my guide was kind enough to get me the instruments required for the ISRO funded research where he was the PI  of the project and I was JRF under him. But how to do research and what to do - that I have learned by myself and therefore I had to struggle much. My guide allowed me to become the first and corresponding author of all of my papers, but many guides even do not allow this and they project themselves as the main author, although in reality whole work was done by the Ph.D. student (I am familiar with some of such guides). I am not going to discuss much about this and try to share what I have learnt during my research period which would have eased my way if I had heard from somebody earlier. 

I faced a lots of problems due to the lack of internet facilities at my department at the initial stage (during 2007-2008) of my research which delayed my Ph.D. to an extent. Now situation is better and I think all universities within India and abroad are probably connected with high speed internet. In 3rd world countries this may still be a problem, and it and must be enquired before you enroll in an institute. The first thing that I'll tell you is that when you choose an area of research be very careful because as I told in My Story all areas of research may not be popular enough in your country and therefore you may not find a relevant post in research institutes if you'd like to become a scientist or researcher in future. Next what is important is the survey of the literature. This is the most important step of any research in any field. I came to know much later how to properly do a survey of literature. I think this should be done in small scale before you finally decide about your area of research. Survey of literature means - you collect many recent and past published researches in the area you want to work and study them to get an idea about overview and recent development in this area. This is not as simple as it seems to be. Nowadays, over 500 papers are published every year in any recognized area of research and it is not possible for even an expert to cover all these. For a newcomer, it is more difficult because many terms and theories are new to him/her and therefore difficult to understand. Also, he/she has to complete it within a limited time period. I therefore suggest not to go for survey of literature by studying 'research articles' in the initial stage, rather if you study 'review articles', just three-four of them if sufficient to give you an idea about the field and the problem under study. For those who don't know - review articles are those published papers that are written by one or more experts in the field who conveys a survey of literature to you along with many definitions and brief discussions on the theory relevant to the subject area. I am not saying that you'll not need to read the main articles, but review articles help you to decide which to read and which not.

Here it becomes clear that you need published papers for doing research and without this, you can not proceed. Generally, research papers are available to download for free from institutional login (i.e. via your institute's internet connection only). Unfortunately, many institutes do not subscribe to some journals which are high in cost or less popular. You may buy a paper for around $30 from the publisher, but this amount is quite high for many. Due to this reason, it becomes difficult to carry on research properly in some fields. In these cases, research students depend upon their guide for papers (because they have access) but many guides are not interested to take this responsibility. Now I know a website which is hosted from Russia where you can download almost any paper just by inserting 'doi' of the paper. They have a huge database of over 70 million academic research papers available to download for free but it violates international copyright laws and for that reason, as a matter of policy I am not able to give you the web address. Since I myself have suffered tremendously for getting published papers as my institute did not subscribe to those journals I needed, I can only help you by informing you that there is a specific Wikipedia page about this website which you can easily find if google with suitable keywords such as - 'free scientific paper download', or something like this. There are other legal ways also to collect papers for free - which I'd actually recommend you to follow. NASA-ADS database provides some free papers in the area of Physics and Astronomy (many other fields such as geology, earth science, etc. are actually included). You may also try to find an arXiv version of the paper you are searching. The arXiv.org is a legal database of preprints (published or unpublished) uploaded by the authors themselves so that people can read. Or you may also choose to write an email to the corresponding author of the paper to provide you what you want. I have collected many papers in this way.

After the survey of literature, next important thing is to write a research proposal sometimes called a synopsis of research. Here you'll choose a title of your work and write a brief description of your research and submit it to your institute for pre-registration. Although it can be changed before the final registration (usually a year later) but procedures are not simple. This is an important step because during your research you will find many fields and sub-fields related to your own where you may get interested in or find it easier to publish a paper. That may create some problem in the final stage - if the reviewer of your thesis finds that the research proposal and what you have done do not match with each other. This may lead to the resubmission of your work. I found it difficult to write my thesis because according to my research proposal title I had to use some spacecraft observations on minor bodies of solar system to compare with my experimental result, but unfortunately, I could not manage to get enough spacecraft data so that I could write a paper on it. Although finally I used some spacecraft data and completed my thesis, but that work was not as significant as it ought to be. I was lucky that the reviewer did not raise this issue. So choose the title carefully.