Conducting Your Own Research Project

You've decided on a topic to look into. Now what happens? You don't feel like you have enough information to really set up your experiment yet. At this point its typically time to go to the library. Even with all of the information and convenient access to the Internet today, libraries are still the key to knowledge and research.

You want to read and see what others have done related to your research topic. There are several reasons to do this.

As we mentioned before - you generally do not want to "reinvent the wheel" in a project. For example, the laws of physics and aerodynamics apply to the flight of a tennis ball. You do not need to "rediscover" these laws. You'll need to understand them though. But then you can concentrate on your particular study. If we go back to the example of the "hot" versus "cold" tennis ball problem; it would probably be good to understand how a room temperature ball behaves first or what affects the bounce of a ball in general.

If you are at the university or college level you may need to determine that your project is unique - that no one has attempted your research before. So you will need to look through the literature and see what research has already been done.

What if someone has done your problem already? Remember Prof. Phil Marcus' comment: "research is doing something new, or doing something a new way." Think of a slightly different way in which you can modify your study. Perhaps the study was done with a particular skill level of player or a specific type of racket material - you could try something slightly different.

If you learn something that applies to your project and you want to use it in your report you'll need to give credit to the authors of the original work - after all they helped you do your project. And that is one of the reasons they published their work in the first place: to make a contribution so that other people can build on their previous research and further the understanding and knowledge in an area.