Zum Inhalt

Course Overview and Objectives

This site outlines the main objectives of this course together with a condensed list of crucial elements that scientific works exhibit. More details and background information about these elements can be found in the literature recommendations.

Practice is Important

Scientfic writing is like learning to swim – you can read a thousand books but you only learn how to swim when being in the water. Just like swimming, your scientific writing skills increase through practice, through hands-on work!

Objectives

Overall Objectives

  • Learn how to write a scientific paper by following the principles of good scientific practices
  • Develop a problem statement and derive research questions for a specific topic
  • Develop a research methodology to tackle an identified problem in a systematic, well-structured, and scientifically sound way
  • Learn how to document and present your research results properly

Milestone-oriented Objectives

  • Learn how to identify a problem and break it down to specific research questions
  • Learn how to write a precise and concise abstract
  • Learn how to write a review for one of your colleagues‘ papers
  • Search for relevant literature in scientific literature databases
  • Learn how to write a scientific paper using LaTeX
  • Become acquianted with the EasyChair conference system

Learn to work efficiently and effectively

Maybe the most important objective of this course is to experience and learn how to independently work on a subject in an efficient, coordinated, and systematic way so that defined quality standards (=those that make a good scientific paper; → see Elements of Scientific Work) are reached.

Elements of Scientific Work

The section briefly mentions some of the elementary components and concepts of proper scientific work practice. You will discover a lot, mostly more detailed in the lecture and through your literature study.

  • Neutrality and objectivity in thinking and writing
    Make no personal judgements and don’t emphasize things you find interesting or fun, i.e., do not over-emphasize things based on personal judgement. Be as neutral as possible in both thinking and writing. Treat all works your considered for your analysis equal, i.e., do not describe one work in a rather long paragraph and another work with onyl one or two sentences. Use identical criteria when you analyze relevant works and ideas upon which your research is based on.

  • Use literature from scientific databases as your primary source of information
    Built your research upon information from the primary literature hosted in established scientific libraries. Use peer-reviewed papers from conferences or journals as your main literature source.

  • Construct Validity
    Ensure the appropriateness of the chosen methodology for tackling an identified problem so that others, when applying your methodology, are likely to gather the same or comparable results (→ Reproducability)

  • External Validity
    Consider the replicability and transferability of the applied methodology and obtained results (→ Generalisation). Your results should be verifable by emperical research results. Others should be able to apply your researched results to comparable problems. Validate the appropriateness of your methodology and generated insights by demonstrating that they also apply to comparable problems and yield similar results.

  • Internal Validity
    Make sure that the logical consistency of the applied causality chain is maintained, i.e., that you used the appropriate set of methods for takling a problem and that the conclusions you draw from your observations are both verifyable and valid (→ “Inducability”)

  • Follow the principles of good scientific work practices
    This usually involves many aspects even bejond the creation of scientific artefacts (→ consult the links in the literature recommendations for more in-depth information about good scientific work practices). From previous experiences with students’ submissions, the following few principles revealed to be of immediate importance as they directly influence a paper’s assessment:

    • Correct indication of external ideas and content
      It should be clear in your texts what your ideas are and what elements resulted from the consultation of external works.

    • Citing external work correctly
      Be advised: Anything you take from external works need to be indicated, i.e., cited. Only take a max. of 3 words directly from external works, not more.

      Avoid Plagiarism – do not copy entire paragraphs

      Do not copy whole paragraphs from external works and only provide one citation at the paragraph’s end. This counts as plagiarism and will be treated as such – with all consequences.

      The LaTeX template provided for this course is already pre-configured and implements a common citation style; so there is no need to modify that.

    • Avoid plagiarism
      This is one of the most crucial elements of good scientific work. Disregarding this principle in general leads to desk rejection of your work and impairs your name. h_da treats plagiarism as an attempt of deception and creates a note in your student record.

  • Deliniate your own work from related works
    This aspect is often neglected in students’ papers and even final theses, which is really unfortunate. Science is not about re-inventing the wheel or copying things others did earlier for the sake of matter (e.g. because students think it might lead to a high assessment of their works because it sounds sophisticated and complex). It is about valuing the work of others and showing how your own work builts (or deliniates) from them. This tremendously helps the reading in grasping the novel aspects of your ideas and work.

  • Elaboration of the State-of-the-Art (SOTA)
    As we have learned, science is standing on the shoulders of giants. Hence, your work is likely to be influenced by existing works; name and discuss these! The discussion of the SOTA is a direct implementation of the science metaphor. This helps the reader to position your work in a domain and wrt. the problem it aims to solve of provides contributions for.

  • and many more…

Recommended Literature

Consult the literature recommendations for more details and background information. It helps a lot.

Literature Recommendations

External Information about good Scientific Work Practices

Letztes Update: 17. September 2024