Scientific Research: Planning, Methodology and Quality Assessment- Intricacies of Research Methodology An Invited Talk at the Shree M N Virani College of Science & Atmiya University And Interaction with the students

1. Scientific Research: Planning, Methodology
and Quality Assessment- Intricacies of
Research Methodology
Prof. Satya P. Singh
UGC BSR Faculty
(Formerly Professor & Head)
UGC-CAS Department of Biosciences
Saurashtra University, Rajkot, Gujarat, India
Email: satyapsingh@yahoo.com satyapsingh125@gmail.com spsingh@sauuni.ac.in
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satya-singh-2285a5144/
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Satya_Singh5
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=jiAzOcgAAAAJ
UGC: https://vidwan.inflibnet.ac.in//profile/68903/Njg5MDM%3D
ORICID Id https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7531-2872

6. CONTENTS
 Research Proposal
 Path of Research
 Components of Research
 Publications and Quality assessment
 Bibliography and Referencing Patters

7. Research Proposal

8. Screening and Assessment of Research Proposal
Research Proposal
Research aptitude
Presentation / Interaction

9. Research proposals: Various Types and
Objectivity
For Degree • Master’s or Doctoral Degree. Evaluated by experts to
determine its significance
For Financial assistance/Fellowships • Government/ private
agencies
For Grants by Government • UGC, CSIR, DBT, NCERT and the ICSSR

10. Research Path and Methodology

11. Path of Research
 Conceiving the Idea- Original/ Existing knowledge in different
form/Offshoots of the existing knowledge
 Designing the Experimental Protocols/ Research
methodologies: Natural Sciences/Social Sciences/ Languages/etc
 Observations and Data Analysis
 Conclusions and Inferences
 Citations and Acknowledgement

12. Components of Research
Theme/Title
Sharp, focused
Neither too long nor too short
Indicative of the proposed work: Theme, Dimension, Spectrum
Can be in question form !!!
Hypothesis
Hypothesis or a set of few appropriate hypotheses, For example-------
Interaction of the biotic and Abiotic factors
Search for a biological activity/Molecule
A sharp & Focused question !!
Simple exploration of the existence of the organisms
Background of the Work
Relevance & Significance of the work
National & International status
Prediction and assessment of the difficulties in Research

13. Objectives
 Focused, Clearly defined,
 Few points ( 3-5) in Heading Format
Experimental design and Methodology
Sample collection and its periodicity
 Methods of collection
Transportation to the lab
Processing and analysis of the sample
Methods of the analysis and Statistical tools
Correlating In-vivo and in-vitro analysis
Correlating field studies and laboratory analysis

14. Expected Outcome/Importance of the Research work
 Importance of the Research proposal – For proper evaluation of the
worth/value/ feasibility
 What may be found? –
 How the outcome would enhance/add to the existing knowledge in the
area?
 Significance of the output in Applications
Description/Statement of the Ethical issue
Research Proposal Writing –
Future tense is used. – Abstract - optional
Bibliography

15. Formats and Objectivity of the Research
 Survey & Distribution of a trend/information/patterns: in a given
section of the society or selected categories of the population, eg.
Education/Literacy/Nutritional status/Occurrence of a
disease/behavioral patterns
Or In a living system-
 Exploratory & Observational
Do some thing-Get something
Biological systems are highly dynamic & diverse
 Asking question/ answering a question/Proving a Hypothesis
 Validation & Confirmation of the facts/observations:
Bioinformatics based predictions, any other observation,
Hypothetical conclusions
 Inventions/ Theory/Principles

16. Publications and Quality assessment

17. PUBLICATIONS AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT
 WIDE VARIATION IN THE ASSESSMENT AND QUALITY JUDGMENT
 DIFFRENTIAL LEVEL OF RESEARCH OUTPUT- Reflected by
number/frequency/quality of the publication
 LACK OF INTEREST
 DIFFERNCES IN OVER ALL OBJECTIVES
 TYPES OF PUBLICATIONS and JOURNALS

18. Citation Index
• Index of citations between publications
• First as legal citation- Shephard citation-1873
• In 1960, Eugene Grafield’s institute for Institute of Scientific
Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers for
academic journals.
• First, Science Citation Index (SCI) and later-Social Sciences Citation
Index (SSCI).
• Science ► Social Sciences ► Humanities
• Retrieval Informations ► Research Evaluation ► Basis for IF

19. Major citation indexing services
• ISI (now part of Thomson Scientific), which
publishes the ISI citation indexes in print and
compact disc.
• Elsevier, which publishes Scopus .
• They differ widely in cost: the ISI databases and
Scopus are Subscription databases, the others are
freely available online.

20. Citation analysis
• Information retrieval later in research evaluation
• Citation: Basis of the Impact factors of the
Journals
• Scientometrics or more specifically bibliometrices.
• Free citation tools are CiteBase, CiteSeerX, Google
Scholar and Windows Live Academic.

21. Journal’s Impact Factor
• Average number of citations to articles
• Journals with higher impact factors ► More Important
• IF devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for
Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters.
• Thomson Reuters Corporation
• A Canada-based multinational media conglomerate
• The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada,
• Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corporation's
purchase of the British company Reuters Group in April 2008[8] and
is majority owned by The Woodbridge Company, a holding company
for the Thomson family.[9]

22. • Calculation of Impact Factor
• In a given year, the impact factor of a journal is the average
number of citations received per paper published in that
journal during the two preceding years.
• For example, if a journal has an impact factor of 3 in 2008,
then its papers published in 2006 and 2007 received 3 citations
each on average. The 2008 impact factor of a journal would be
calculated as follows:
• A = the number of times articles published in 2006 and 2007
were cited by indexed journals during 2008
B = the total number of "citable items" published by that
journal in 2006 and 2007.
2008 impact factor = A/B

23. Use & Validity of Impact factor
• To compare different journals: within a certain field
• Highly discipline-dependent:
• Average number of citations per paper
• Self-citation: The frequency of author’s own work
• Larger percentage of review articles by the journals: Generally cited
more than research reports
• Methods in the same Journals: Would enhance IF in their respective
fields.
• Word- Phrase-software being frequently used

24. Incorrect application of IF
• To evaluate the significance of an individual publication or
to evaluate an individual researcher, may be incorrectly
applied
• A small number of publications are cited much more than
the majority - for example, about 90% of Nature's 2004
impact factor was based on only 25% of its publications,
• Underestimation of the MOST-CITED Articles and
Exaggeration of the citations of the majority of the articles
• Assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the
reputation of the journal.
• Individual Articles vs Journals Reputation

25. The misuse of the journal impact factor
Bias journals against publishing important papers in fields (such as social
sciences and ecology) that are much less cited than others (such as
biomedicine).
It takes years to create a new approach in a new experimental context,
during which no publications should be expected.
Such metrics further block innovation because they encourage scientists to
work in areas of science that are already highly populated, as it is only in
these fields that large numbers of scientists can be expected to reference
one's work, no matter how outstanding

26. No more first authors, no more last authors
WORLD VIEW
25 September 2018, Nature 561, 435 (2018) doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-
06779-2
Gretchen L. Kiser
To Promote transdisciplinary research, we must ditch the ordered listing
of authors that stalls collaborative science
To acknowledge the products of research in more-innovative ways, the
value of ‘team-ness’ might grow in academic culture and the cutting edge
will get sharper.
No need to cajole anyone to participate in team-building activities

27. H - Index
• Productivity and impact of the published work of
a scientist or a scholar
• Applied to the productivity and impact of a group
of scientists, such as a department or university or
country.
• The index was suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch, and is
sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

28. H-Index plot

29. • Comparing scientists working in the same field: citation
conventions differ widely among different fields
• Highly cited articles contribute to the h-index: its determination is
a relatively simpler process
• The h-index grows as citations accumulate and thus it depends on the
'academic age' of a researcher.
• Hirsch suggested that, for physicists, a value for h of about:
10–12 for tenure decisions at major research universities. A val
18 -a full professorship
15–20- a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and
45- Membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences.

30. Calculating h
• The h-index can be manually determined using citation
databases or using automatic tools
• Subscription-based databases such as Scopus and the
Web of Knowledge provide automated calculators.
• H index means h, it means that h of his Np papers have
at least h citations each
• In addition, specific databases, such as the Stanford
Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) can
automatically calculate h-index for researchers working in
High Energy Physics.

31. Advantages
• Bibliometric indicators: The h-index was intended to
address the main disadvantages of other, such as total
number of papers or total number of citations.
• Quality and sustainability of the scientific output:
simultaneously
• Much less affected by the methodological papers-
proposing successful new techniques, methods or
approximations, which can be extremely highly cited.

32. Criticism
• Number of authors: The h-index does not account
• Does not account for the typical number of citations
in different fields: Different fields, or journals,
traditionally use different numbers of citations
• Bounded by the total number of publications:
citations made in a negative context and citations made
to fraudulent or retracted work
• Researcher in the same stage of their careers: The
index intended as a tool to evaluate researchers in the
same stage of their careers

33. Limitations
• Review articles generally are cited more frequently than
typical research articles.
• Method articles: It is widely believed that methods
articles attract more citations than other types of articles
• Journal self-citation.
• It does not distinguish between letters, reviews, or
original research.
• The coverage is very uneven.

34. Bibliography and Referencing Patterns

35. What is a citation and citation style?
• Citation: Credit to individuals for their works used to support your
research
• To locate particular sources and combat plagiarism
• Typically, a citation includes: Author's name, date/year, location of the
publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifer).
• A citation style:
Order of the information: Authors, year, title, name of journal, punctuation and
other formatting.

36. Citation style?
• Different ways of citing resources
• Citation style sometimes depends on the academic discipline involved
• For example:
• APA (American Psychological Association): For Education, Psychology, and
Sciences
• MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used by the Humanities
• Chicago/Turabian: Used by Business, History, and the Fine Arts

37. How to obtain ready reference of specific
style ?

38. Example: Multiple authors

39. Book chapter

40. Book

41. Folia Microbiologica: Springer (Rathore and Singh,
2021)

42. Frontiers in Microbiology: Bhatt and Singh
(2020)

43. IJSEM: Bhatt et al. (2017)

44. IJBIOMAC: Sharma et al. (2020)

47. • Consists of 5 databases
– Science Citation Index Expanded
• 6,650 journals since 1900
– Social Sciences Citation Index
• 1,950 (+3,300) journals since 1956
– Arts & Humanities Citation Index
• 1,160 journals (+6,800)
– Index Chemicus (chemical structures)
– Current Chemical Reactions (synthetic methods)
Web of Science

48. • 100,000s NEW cited references added each week
• Generate citation reports
• Eliminate self-citations
• ‘My Citation Alerts’
• Author-finder (The Distinct Author Set feature)
– “A discovery tool showing sets of papers likely written by
the same person. Citation data is analyzed to create these
sets. This feature should be used as a tool to focus your
search rather than as a definitive list of a specific author's
works.”
Web of Science: citation analysis

49. • Search for relevant articles on the topic
• Limit articles by location and institution
• Rank articles by times cited
• List authors of most often cited articles
• Create citation reports on individual authors
• Rank authors according to citations
• Choose appropriate scholars from list
Web of Science: methodology

50. Pros
 Citation report provides clear data and graphs over time
 Author finder helps differentiate different authors with same name
 ‘My Citation Alerts’ allows personalization
 Results page allows for refining
Cons
 Still difficult to differentiate authors with same name
 Cannot produce author-based citation reports from a list of
articles
 Can limit by country but cannot exclude countries
 Difficult to locate controlled vocabulary used in subject
indexing
Web of Science: Evaluation

51. Coverage of:
• social sciences
• life sciences
• health sciences
• physical sciences
Scopus includes research literature published in:
• 15, 000 peer reviewed academic journals
• 1,200 Open Access journals
• 500 conference proceedings
• Over 600 trade publications
• book chapters and 200 book series
• 386 million web sources (author homepages, university sites, Open
Archives Initiative)
• 22 million patents
Includes citation analysis for journals and authors from 1996 and on.
Multidisciplinary Database

52. Personal observations:
Cons:
• Citation analysis from 1996 on- so landmark articles from earlier years may
not show up.
• Does not allow automatic generation of top-cited authors’ list from search
results
• Poor ability to limit to a country (academics move around and publish in
countries other than their country of residence)
• The citation analysis page does not have the author’s name displayed
Pros:
• Generates a list of keywords relevant to the term searched (enriches searcher’s
vocabulary and assists in refining search query
• Allows very precise control and manipulation of results through “refine
results” options
• Allows personalization, list-saving and automatic alerts
• Good multidisciplinary coverage of topics in one search (e.g.- see who is
writing about sustainable agriculture in a variety of fields)
• Has function to eliminate self citations by the authors being analyzed
• Precise author indexing (few instances of numerous variations in authors’
names)
Multidisciplinary Database

53. Google Scholar
• Articles from some of CrossRef’s partipating publishers and others that
have made content available to Google Scholar
• More medicine and scientific resources than humanities and social
science
• Preprints, e-prints, university publications
• Books from OCLC’s Open WorldCat
the most accessible content, i.e., open access (OA) and public domain
collections. ... WorldCat Local helps us prioritize which copyright holders
to approach.
• Citations extracted from crawled articles using “special algorithms”

54. How scholarly is Google Scholar?
• Google says it has “peer-reviewed papers, theses, books,
abstracts and articles…”
• Unscholarly items find their way into GS
• Ranking of items gives weight to number of times cited,
and the number of versions (preprints, conference papers,
mirror sites)
• Never assume…

55. Go to Google Scholar – http://scholar.google.com/
Do a search for a particular name and topic and then add to the end of the search “-author:”
Example searches:
author: S.P.Singh
Google Scholar Articles Add id and password in Gmail
account Add name of author Get Result
Citations in Google Scholar:

56. Web of Science Scopus Google Scholar
◦Science Citation Index
Expanded
◦Social Sciences
Citation Index
◦Arts & Humanities
Citation Index
◦Index Chemicus
(chemical structures)
◦Current Chemical
Reactions (synthetic
method)
Social sciences
Life sciences
Health sciences
Physical sciences
Articles from some of CrossRef’s partipating
publishers and others that have made content available
to Google Scholar
More medicine and scientific resources
than humanities and social science
Preprints, e-prints, university publications
Books from OCLC’s Open WorldCat
6,650 journals since 1900
1,950 (+3,300) journals
since 1956
1,160 journals (+6,800)
15, 000 peer reviewed academic
journals
1,200 Open Access journals
500 conference proceedings
Over 600 trade publications
book chapters and 200 book series
386 million web sources (author
homepages, university sites, Open
Archives Initiative)
22 million patents
Includes citation analysis for
journals and authors from 1996 and
on
Citations extracted from crawled articles using “special
algorithms”
GS also includes non scholarly material as well as
books
Google Scholar has a wider coverage of Open Access (OA)
web documents and non-journal documents more useful for
citation tracking across full text documents

60. Acknowledgements

61. Express Gratitude to
His Holiness Tyag Ballabh Swami Ji
Atmiya University
Shree M N Virani College of Science
Principal Ladva Sir
Dr. Neepa Pandhi & All Faculty Members
&
Dear Students

62. SPS Research Team
Dr. Sangeeta Gohel, Assistant Professor, Saurashtra University
Dr. Vikram Raval, DST Young Scientist (Now at Gujarat University)
Dr. Aparna Singh, DST Women Scientist ( Now Asstt. Prof, Surat)
Dr. Kalpana Rakholiya, SERB- National Post-Doctoral Fellow
Ms. Kruti Dangar, DST Women Scientist (Now Asstt. prof,
Saurashtra University)
&
Ph.D./M.Phil/M.Sc. Students

63. Dr. Bharat Joshi (Canada)
Dr. Manish Bhatt ( Canada)
Dr. Rajesh K. Patel ( Professor, VNUSG, Surat)
Dr. Anju Mittal ( Scientist, USA)
Dr. Mital Dodia ( Scientist, Canada)
 Dr.. Jignasha Thumar ( Asstt. Prof. Gandhinagar)
Dr. Rupal Joshi (ZRC, Ahmedabad)
Dr. Chetna Rajyaguru (Associate Prof. Rajkot)
Ms. Geera Mankad ( Associate Prof. Rajkot)
Dr. Chirantan Raval ( Asst Prof., Govt College)
 Dr. Megha Purohit ( Scientist and Entrepreneur,
Canada)
Dr. Himanshu Bhimani ( Associate Prof. Navsari
Ag Univ,)
Dr. Bhavtosh Kikani (Asstt Prof. CHARUSAT)
Dr. Vikram Raval (Asstt Prof. Gujarat University)
Dr. Sangeeta Gohel (Asstt Prof. Saurashtra
University)
Dr. Sandeep Pandey (Scientist, Pharma, Daman)
Dr. Viral Akbari ( Scientist, UK)
Dr. Rushit Shukla (Asstt Prof. Christ College,
Rajkot)
Dr. Amit Sharma (Scientist, ZRC, Ahmedabad)
Dr. Kruti Dangar (Asstt Prof. Saurashtra
University)
Dr. Atman Vaidya ( Biology Teacher &
Entrepreneur)
Dr.r. Hitarth Bhatt (Asstt Prof. Virani College,
Rajkot)
Dr. Rupal Pandya (USA)
Dr. Foram Thakrar ( Ahmedabad)
Dr. Dalip Singh Rathore ( GBRC, Gandhinagar)
Acknowledgements : Ph.D. Students

64. Financial Support
DBT, UGC, DST, MoES, GSBTM,
Saurashtra University, Rajkot
Research Collaborations
•IIT Delhi, New Delhi: Prof. S. K.Khare
•DUSC, New Delhi: Prof. Sanjay Kapoor
•NFRI, Tsukuba, Japan: Dr. Kiyoshi Hayashi ( Now at
Toyo University, Japan)
•Griffith University, Australia
•JNTU Hyderabad, Prof. Ch. Sasikala
•Central University of Hyderabad, Prof. Ch. Rama Rao

66. Richard Feynman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman, an American theoretical physicist, known for
his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics,

67. Assignment
Question -1: What are different reasons for the variability in publications
among the scientists/students. (One para or 5-7 Points)
Question-2: In the light of the historical background of the citations, discus its
implications (One para or 5-7 Points)
Question-3 Discuss the Impact factors of the journals in the context of the
assessment of the credentials of the scientists. (One-two para)
Question-4 Highlight the merits of H-Index? (up to 5 Points)
Question-5 List 10 Journals with Impact factors and publishers of your
research areas

68. Thank you