PHYS 395: Research Methods - Spring 2020

Location & Contact Info
Instructors: Sergiy Bubin (part I), Thomas Oikonomou (part II), and Konstantinos Valagiannopoulos (part III)
Lecture Hours: Mon,Wed,Fri 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm in room 7.246
Office Hours (Sergiy Bubin): Tue 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Thu 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm in room 7E.333 (or by appointment)
Email (Sergiy Bubin): sergiy.bubin@nu.edu.kz
Office Phone (Sergiy Bubin): +7 (7172) 69 46 63
Course Description
This course is designed to help students acquire basic knowledge and skills that are essential in everyday research work in modern academic, industrial, and government environments. Specific topics include: characteristics of good research, science ethics, science funding, research proposals, gathering and critical evaluation of scientific information, bibliometrics and scientometrics, writing scientific reports and white papers, publication process in peer-reviewed journals, preparing technical oral presentations, dissemination of research results, proprietary vs open science, science policies and advocacy, public outreach, and others. Along with the general concepts relevant to those topics, the students will learn how to use various tools and software commonly used in the physics community.
Course Info
Syllabus: syllabussyllabus.pdf
Textbooks
No particular text has been assigned to this class. Each specific topic or assignment may require working with different sources of information (intructors will provide some references or weblinks).
Assignments
The course will have several written assignments and oral presentations (in various formats)
Lecture Materials
Important note: Lecture materials provided below may be inclomplete and should not be considered a full substitute for notes taken in class
  Lecture        Date   File Topic
Lecture #1 Jan 15 leclec01.pdf Scientific research and its characteristics. Measures of quality.
Lecture #2 Jan 17 leclec02.pdf Authorship, plagiarism, text reuse, and digital footprint.
Lecture #3 Jan 20 leclec03.pdf Science ethics, fraud, retraction of papers, the Schön scandal, predatory publishing.
Lecture #4 Jan 22 leclec04.pdf Search for scientific information, bibliographic databases, scientometrics, citations, Hirsch-index.
Lecture #5 Jan 24 leclec05.pdf Publication process in a scientific journal.
Lecture #6 Jan 27 leclec06.pdf Typesetting technical documents with LaTeX.
Lecture #7 Jan 29 leclec07.pdf Managing bibliography with BibTeX.

Assignments
Assignment Files Due Date
Assignment #1 hwas1.pdf hwpaper_template.tex Feb 14
Assignment #2 hwas2.pdf individual for each student

Found an error on this page or in any of the pdf files? Send an email to the instructor at sergiy.bubin@nu.edu.kz.