Innovations in Information Retrieval: Perspectives for Theory and Practice
Library Management · 2012
Often the most difficult process for a postgraduate research student is not the process of research; many may find the research process arduous and bewildering but -with adequate supervision and a robust research plan -students tend to cope well with the methodological demands and data collection.Instead, where students struggle is identifying a topic worth studying in the first place (Millman, 1998).This scenario is not limited to the information, computer, or library sciences.It is a phenomenon that often transcends disciplinary boundaries and academic levels of study (Hirt and Muffo, 1998).Students may have the faint inkling of a topic area but may have insufficiently assimilated extant literature, or simply struggled to understand the research landscape, and in so doing failed to articulate a satisfactory research topic with any degree of specificity.