It's high time I started looking into this aspect seriously. What really is independent research?
It's simply the maturity to conduct research whose contributions have been assessed to be worthwhile, research which you think is significant enough to warrant publication and research where you have an idea of what the possible data sources are.
This begs the question as to what research is?
Simply stated, research always begins with getting a feel for the chosen field of interest. This is done by reading journal papers and articles in the area of interest. The next step is to identify gaps in the existing literature - either a modeling, methodological or a practical gap or a combinaton of them.
So once you have these gaps, you already have a problem to work on, all you need to do is delineate clearly the objectives of the study and the problem features and you are on a roll.
Now doing research in a new area might require extra reading depending on the methodological quotient of the research area. OR is fairly methodological, transportaion operations is half as much. But then again, there might be a fair amount of data collection issues that need to be dealt in area such as transportation engineering.
All said and done, what one needs is the confidence and the will to do it and that surely will take the person on the path to being an independent and influential researcher.
It's simply the maturity to conduct research whose contributions have been assessed to be worthwhile, research which you think is significant enough to warrant publication and research where you have an idea of what the possible data sources are.
This begs the question as to what research is?
Simply stated, research always begins with getting a feel for the chosen field of interest. This is done by reading journal papers and articles in the area of interest. The next step is to identify gaps in the existing literature - either a modeling, methodological or a practical gap or a combinaton of them.
So once you have these gaps, you already have a problem to work on, all you need to do is delineate clearly the objectives of the study and the problem features and you are on a roll.
Now doing research in a new area might require extra reading depending on the methodological quotient of the research area. OR is fairly methodological, transportaion operations is half as much. But then again, there might be a fair amount of data collection issues that need to be dealt in area such as transportation engineering.
All said and done, what one needs is the confidence and the will to do it and that surely will take the person on the path to being an independent and influential researcher.
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