 Hello, my name is Simon Paulie. I come from the UK originally where I studied at University College London. I then taught at the University of Oxford and at Nazarbayr University in Kazakhstan before I came to Tashkent to join British Management University about one year ago. This semester I'm teaching a course on academic skills for our first year foundation year students. It's part of the foundation year programme which is all about getting students ready for university level study. The academic skills course introduces students to the idea of an academic community and helps them to learn what they need to do to study successfully and to become full members of a university. It introduces them to university life and helps them to develop some of the skills they will need to succeed in their further studies. I hope that you'll be able to join me in one of my classes very soon. I'm talking about doing research. What we're going to do today is talk a bit about principles of conducting research, how to go about it, especially about defining a research topic. Then we're going to talk about academic sources for research and finding them. Let's start with choosing a research topic. What should a good research topic be like? What makes a good research topic? Original. Something new. That's good. Title. What is important about the title? The name of the project. Specific. The topic should be clearly specifically defined. It's important to know what you're focusing on. Why? What's the problem with having a vague topic or a topic that you're not quite sure exactly what it's about? It should be conducted with academic language. Okay. Without any informalities. Why? First of all because a reader should understand it and it should be easy to get the topic. Okay. So this is academic language can help us to define things in a precise way. So I think we talked about this a week or two ago. Sometimes academic language is hard to understand or very specific, very technical, but the reason for using it is to be exact. So we're clear exactly what we're talking about. Okay. Why do we need a specifically defined topic? Let's think about an example. Let's say I want to start a research project about why people get angry with each other or why people are unpleasant to each other. What do you think of my research topic? Too broad. Too broad? It will take a lot of time. It's going to be a really big topic so you have to be more specific. I made it as an interesting experience. Right. My topic contains too many things, right? Why do people get angry with each other? It could be like why do couples fight? Why do wars start? Why do parents shout at their children? There are many things, right? I'm going to get lost very quickly. I need more focus. Part of the reason for that is I'm going to see this in a minute. When you start looking for information, when you start searching for information, you find a lot, right? You find a lot of results. So you need to keep your focus. Otherwise you're going to get distracted. You're going to lose your sense of what your topic is. And your research project is going to seem too big, too vague to deal with. So it needs to be specific. OK. So it should be specific. We need to think language is part of being specific, right? So finding the right terminology can help us to pin down what we're doing. And we want to do something new. Now doing something new is not necessarily easy. What do you think are the challenges of doing something new? Why is it difficult to do a new research topic? Secondly, if you have a kind of idea that comes out of nowhere, then you don't really know where to start. So what's a good strategy for doing something new in a way that's going to be manageable and to make sure that your idea really is new? How can you go about it? Finding something that already exists and then adding something new to it. Yeah. OK. This is how it's going to work most of the time. You're probably not going to open up a completely new area of research. You're going to find a topic that somebody has said something about and you're going to find a new angle on it. Can anyone think of an example of how to do that or a way that you might be able to do that? OK. Here's a tip. For a lot of different topics, we here have a big advantage in terms of where we live, where we're located. Because there's lots and lots of topics that have been written about a lot, but people haven't said so much or thought so much about Uzbekistan specifically. Lots of research about education, about marketing, about business, all kinds of different topics. You can find a lot of information, but maybe people haven't said very much about Uzbekistan. So you can gather information. You can see how does this work in America, in China, in Germany, and then you can make a comparison. What does it look like in Uzbekistan? That gives you a way to say something new. That's not the only way to go about it, but you get the idea. The point is to find a new angle on a topic that somebody has already looked at. OK. Other things. We're talking in quite general terms. Thinking about what you're going to have to do as students. You also need to think in practical terms. Most of the research projects that you do, you won't have so much time for them, so you need to think what can I realistically do in the time I have with the resources I have? In a few weeks working on your own, what can you do? You need to make sure that your project is going to be manageable. If you need to collect data, it needs to be a realistic amount of data to collect and to analyse. If you're given an assignment, obviously there are going to be requirements. You have to make sure that your topic matches your requirements. It's a good idea if your topic is interesting. Why should it be interesting? Who's attention do you need to grab? First of all you need to think about who your audience is going to be. Don't think in terms of, I need to find a topic that's going to be interesting to the entire world. You probably won't find one. You need to think, okay. Second of the resources to find what's lacking there, or what you need to add probably, then you will start looking for that information. You really need to find out, first of all, some basic information about the topic, and secondly what kind of research other people have done before. Before you start getting into doing your own research. So you're going to start with some secondary sources. What kind? What are your first steps in research going to be? What kinds of secondary sources might you go to? If you need to establish some basic facts, where are you going to go? Other ones, researches. Okay. All right. The sites where they published their research. Uh-huh. So you... Maybe ask people. Which people? Scientists. No, like... So kind of conduct a survey, like depend which is on your topic. Okay. Researches. Conducting a survey is going to take you some time. It might be a good thing to do a bit later on, but in order to conduct a survey, you need to think what questions am I going to ask, and which people am I going to ask them to. Before you can start doing that, you need to find out a bit about the topic. You need to find out some information and start reading a little bit. Now, you could go to existing research. You could start reading it. Okay. The problem with that is, you know, in a book on a topic, do you want to sit and read a 300-page book before you do anything else? Not really. You want to get some idea are you going in the right direction or not? So what can you do that's quicker than reading a book? Read a summary of a book. Okay. All right. Now we're talking. Where are you going to find a summary of a book? All right. Look, this isn't like not a totally different world. You can still act the way you act in normal life, right? If you don't know anything about a topic or you need to get some really basic information, the kind of obvious quick thing to do is just start searching the internet, right? Just to get a first idea, what information will you be able to find just from a Google search? What kinds of things can you get? General idea? I think what you need. Not everything that you need. Some things. Some things that will help you get started. Okay, but if you go straight to the academic research straight away, it's going to be long, it's going to be complicated, it's going to be hard to read. You have to make decisions about which academic research you're going to read. First, you need to start to get a rough idea of the topic. Search on Google, something like that. What are you going to find there? What are you going to see in your Google results? Straight away. It will give you some clues. You're going to start seeing a few main facts, maybe some names, some dates, some keywords. Some of it, you might not be sure about how reliable it is. But that doesn't matter too much at the very early stage. You're just getting a general idea. What is this topic about? What are the key words? What are the main issues here? To guide your further research. Nobody? Okay. Groups of three or four, just take a look at these and see if you can see what is special about them that suggests they're academic. How do we know whether they're academic or not? How serious is it? How credible is it? How reliable is it? And how do you know? Russian or English? When you go into a bookshop, you see books like how to get rich, how to get fit, how to lose weight. These things are different. They're not the same. What are the differences? Find the main differences. Is this any good to you or not? Have a quick look. Okay, you don't need to summarise the article or anything like that. What I want you to do is to look at it and say is this academic or not academic? And how do we know? What clues do we have? How do you know? It's not the kind of question. I don't see too many new words here. Keep reading. Recoding the semantic field of geographical space in the paradigm of an ethno-national state. Come on. Seriously? I haven't seen that yet. Look at these notes, references. Why are these things part of an academic text? What's their purpose? Why are they there? What are they for?