How to Do Great Research

We (Professors Nick Feamster and Alex Gray) created a course as a resource for advice on research and creativity methods and techniques for Ph.D. students. We originally created the material as part of a course offering at Georgia Tech (read on for the history).  

The intended audience for this site is Ph.D. students in computer science programs, but many of the concepts that we present on this site may also apply to other disciplines.

Reading

Much of this material in this course is available in article format on my Great Research blog. Links to specific topics are included below.

Philipp Winter’s Research Power Tools is also an excellent read and is available online, as well.

Syllabus

We have designed this material to fit into a one-term course. Here is a schedule for how a course can organize topics, readings, and the assignments below.

Skills

The material we have provided will prepare you to perform great research in computer science, regardless of the area you ultimately choose to pursue for your Ph.D. The material should:

• Teach you many skills that you will keep in your "research toolbox" for the rest of your career. Each of these linked topics below includes a reading, slides, or both that could be used as part of a lecture.
  • Understanding the goals of a Ph.D. [slides]
  • Time management [slides]
  • How to review a research paper [slides]
  • How to write a research paper (technical writing) [slides]
  • Understanding patterns in research ideas [slides]
  • How to generate ideas, creativity, sources of problems [slides]
  • People skills [slides]
  • How to give a good talk [slides]
  • How to think about jobs [slides]
  • How to write a proposal
  • Cultivating your taste in research
  • Productivity and (selective) procrastination [slides]
  • How to read a research paper [slides]
• Find some inspiration regarding open problems and big ideas
• Offer general tips for life in graduate school and beyond

Exercises

As part of the course we created, we developed several exercises to complete to help better develop your research toolbox:

• Recognizing good ideas
• Creating research ideas
• Applying research ideas across disciplines
• Critiquing and evaluating research ideas

We also have developed several mini-exercises that should be practically useful for many Ph.D. students:

• Why a Ph.D.?
• Managing time
• Creating a research web page
• Developing an elevator pitch

Projects

The course also has two projects:

• Mini-Project: This project allows a student to meet and experiment working with different faculty members in the department.
• Main Project: This project allows a student to work on a research problem with a faculty member in the department with the goal of developing a path towards a publishable research paper.

Background

The material that we have provided on this site is based on a class that was designed by Professors Nick Feamster and Alex Gray from Fall 2006 through Fall 2010 at Georgia Tech.

We have learned a lot from these course offerings.  We have distilled many of our insights and lessons from teaching this course in an ACM SIGCSE paper.  

Various aspects of this course have been used and replicated at universities around the world.  We have made the material from the course available to others for the benefit of both computer science Ph.D. students and others who might wish to teach a similar course.

You can read more about the course background here.

License

How to Do Great Research by Nick Feamster is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.