1. What is research?

Answer- Research is a process of systematic inquiry that includes collection of data; documentation of critical information; and analysis and interpretation of that data/information, in accordance with suitable methodologies set by specific professional fields and academic disciplines.

2. What is the purpose of a research?

Answer- The main purpose of research is to inform action, to prove a theory, and contribute to developing knowledge in a field or study.

3. Why should I do a research study?

Answer- A student/faculty should participate in a research because research helps to:

• Improve greater problem solving skills
• Gain better understanding of research methods
• Deepen understanding of the discipline
• Enhance greater confidence and independence
• Develop better understanding of education/career path

4. Do I need money to conduct a research?

Answer- There are some fields that do not need funding for research to happen and there are some fields that requires. But to do the research does not always need a lot of money.

5. How many types of research are there?

Answer- There are mainly 2 types of research. One is Pure Research that is carried out to generate new human knowledge. And another one is Applied Research that borrows ideas and techniques from pure research to serve a specific real-world goal. Apart from these main types, there are other types of research as well. The most common types are: Descriptive research is describing the state of affairs as it exists at present. Quantitative research is recognized by its name. It is the measurement of quantity or amount. It is applicable to all things which we can measure in terms of quantity. Qualitative research is simply means quality. Something related to or involving quality or kind is qualitative research. Conceptual research is related to some abstract ideas or theory. It is mostly used by thinkers and philosophers to develop new concepts or to reinterpret existing ones. Empirical research relies on experience or observation alone, often without due regard for system and theory. It is data-based research, coming up with conclusions which are capable of being verified by observation or experiment.

6. What is research methodology?

Answer- Research methodology is the specific procedures or techniques used to identify, select, process, and analyze information about a topic.

7. What are the basic research methodologies?

Answer- There are 5 basic methodologies to follow during conducting a research and they are:

• Observation / Participant Observation
• Surveys
• Interviews
• Focus Groups
• Experiments
• Secondary Data Analysis / Archival Study
• Mixed Methods (combination of some of the above)

8. What is a general format to document a research?

Answer- A research paper is generally documented in the following format: Background of the Problem (ending with a problem statement): Why is this important to study? What is the problem being investigated? Review of Literature: What do we already know about this problem or situation? Methodology (participants, instruments, procedures): How was the study conducted? Who were the participants? What data were collected and how? Analysis: What are the results? What did the data indicate? Results: What are the implications of these results? How do they agree or disagree with previous research? What do we still need to learn? What are the limitations of this study?

9. What is literature review?

Answer- A literature review is a survey of scholarly reading materials on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing ,Now, New research. Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analyzing publications (such as books and journal articles) that relate to your research question.

10. How to write a literature review?

Answer- A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject. To write a literature review, one has to: Search for relevant literature Evaluate sources Identify themes, debates and gaps Outline the structure Finally, write the literature review

11. What is data analysis?

Answer- Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusion and supporting decision- making.

12. What are the methods of data analysis?

Answer- There are two methods that a researcher can pursue; qualitative and quantitative: Qualitative research revolves around describing characteristics. It does not use numbers. A good way to remember qualitative research is to think of quality. Quantitative research is the opposite of qualitative research because its prime focus is numbers. Quantitative research is all about quantity.

13. What are tools that I can use to analyze data?

Answer- Some common and popular data analytical tools have been listed below: R Programming is the leading analytics tool in the industry and widely used for statistics and data modeling. Tableau Public is a free software that connects any data source be it corporate Data Warehouse, Microsoft Excel or web-based data, and creates data visualizations, maps, dashboards etc. Python is an object-oriented scripting language which is easy to read, write, maintain and is a free open source tool. Sas is a programming environment and language for data manipulation and a leader in analytics Apache Spark is a fast large-scale data processing engine. Spark is built on data science and its concept makes data science effortless. Spark is also popular for data pipelines and machine learning models development. Excel is a basic, popular and widely used analytical tool almost in all industries. Excel becomes important when there is a requirement of analytics on the clients internal data. It analyzes the complex task that summarizes the data with a preview of pivot tables that helps in filtering the data as per client requirement. Rapid Miner is a powerful integrated data science platform that performs predictive analysis and other advanced analytics like data mining, text analytics, machine learning and visual analytics without any programming. KNIME is leading open source, reporting, and integrated analytics tools that allows analyze and model the data through visual programming, it integrates various components for data mining and machine learning via its modular data-pipelining concept. QlikView has many unique features like patented technology and has in-memory data processing, which executes the result very fast to the end users and stores the data in the report itself. Splunk is a tool that analyzes and search the machine-generated data. Splunk pulls all text-based log data and provides a simple way to search through it.