R1 Title to Lit Review

Q. What’s in a title?

A. Everything …….. or nothing.

Think of Multi-map for a minute (sorry for the continuing ‘driving’ metaphor), but if you go to their website seeking directions it requires of you two critical pieces of information, otherwise it can’t help you much at all:

1. Point of departure
2. Destination

The same is true of research: you need to know:

1. what exactly is the issue/matter you are going to investigate
2. why you are doing it: with a view to being able to………….? [Solve a problem, improve performance, get better value for money, achieve enhanced levels of customer satisfaction….?]

It goes without saying that if you are in any way unclear or imprecise as to either of these, then, even with Multimap’s capability to plot location within a few metres, the software will only be able to give you a limited and vague response (if anything at all).  Multimap can only ‘join the dots’ – but if you don’t correctly place the dots…..?  [Well, it can give you a route, of course, but it won’t get you where you wanted to be!]  It is a case of the ‘First Law of Computing’:  Garbage-in –> Garbage-out. The same is obviously true of research: if your title and aims and objectives are unclear (point of departure) and you have little or no concept of what you hope to achieve by it (the destination), then basically you are’ lost’: you will be expending a lot of time and effort in not reaching any objective.  A waste of marks too…….

I find that students are generally not as clear on defining the issue as they should be and most often have little or no idea of their final research ‘destination’.  This is not a good sign – especially if it persists at Masters level.

As a result, I have tried to put together a number of files for you on various stages in the research process.

This is the first which takes you from title definition to the Literature Review…..

Right…. ready to move on to the next stage…..?