Know Your Community

Hello, everyone.

I’m Haruki.

In our previous video, we explained why it is important for researchers to publish papers.

In this video, we will explain how to get to know your specific scientific community.

Knowing the academic context of your research, will help you define the importance of the research, and it may also help you to think about your future career.

The questions here to consider are, which academic conferences are important for your research?

Which academic journals are relevant to your research?

What are the important theories and concepts in your particular research domain?

Who are the influential researchers?

In that academic community.

First of all, this process is not a one shot process but a continuous and iterative process.

And there’s no one standard way.

You learn as you go.

So please consider this as general guidelines.

Knowing your community process has mainly two aspects.

Firstly, it;’s about making precise research and secondly, it’s about discovering researchers working on your topic.

In science, most domains has an application area, such as applied math, applied physics, applied chemistry.

The precision of the research focus is not only the question of basic or applied.

As you know, theoretical approaches and experimental approaches are two different approaches to rebuild the same phenomenon.

The experiment can adapt both qualitative or quantitative methods.

Suppose that you are developing a detector for a specific particle.

You may have different selections for fitting gases.

You may have Xenon or Argon.

So as a matter of course your priority is reading the article that use the same methodology as your research.

The second aspect is to discover key researchers in your topic.

You will find who are working on your topic, who are important for your research domain and for information in that specific community.

In fact, you need to look through plenty of academic papers to understand better your scientific community but you need not read all of them.

Your work is to classify those papers into groups.

Essential papers and related papers.

So as to understand and find you your academic context and network.

And by reading articles you will find few domains that are essential to your research focus.

And several domains that relates to your research.

This differentiation between essential and related helps you to position your research under the scientific context.

Identifying academic conferences and journals will help you to discover the ecosystem of the community.

In some cases, visiting nearby research centers and experimental laboratories in your institution may be the first step to do.

Or making a recent 10 years bibliography of specific topic may also help you.

In the end, you would identify several important journals for your research and you will know several theories and researchers essential to your research.

And you may meet some authors in a conference that will be the starting point to build your own unique academic network.

To some effect, knowing your community helps you understand the academic context of your research, and in fact knowing your community is understanding about your research itself.

Thank you for watching and see you on the next video.

Bye.