Category: 1.1 Research (General)

Some of my colleagues like to talk about how research that involves programming is “hard”, while research that involves human subjects is “soft”. Similarly, some colleagues like to call exploratory (qualitative) research “soft” and confirmatory (quantitative) research “hard”. Soft and hard are often used as synonyms for easy and difficult, and this is plain wrong.…

A short Twitter thread: Scientific research papers cite other research papers for related or prior knowledge they build on; they cite blog posts as primary material to work with in theory building; two very different things 1/4 A blog post needs to (a) properly use the scientific method and (b) be socially validated by peer…

I just attended FSE 2016, a leading academic conference on software engineering research. As is en vogue, it had a session on why so much software engineering research seems so removed from reality. One observation was that academics toil in areas of little interest to practice, publishing one incremental paper of little relevance after another.…

I’m at a loss over the recent reports on the requirement for all research publications to be open access by 2020. Open access means that the research papers are accessible openly without a fee. There are plenty of confusing if not outright wrong statements in the press, but I’m not so much concerned with poor…

I’ve been enjoying the discussion around Patek’s recent video argument for knowledge for knowledge’s sake in several forums. I thought I’d summarize my arguments here. To me it looks all pretty straightforward. From a principled stance, as to funding research, it is the funder’s prerogative who to fund. Often, grant proposals (funding requests) exceed available…