Many common people thinks that research is about finding out or discovering new things. That means, only new findings or descriptions of new things can be published. But, that is not the true spirit of research. From my own personal experience working on research projects for twenty years, research is about investigating something or solve a problem. The problem can be personal, local, or global. But it needs solution. Naturally, you want the best and most optimal solution; but nonetheless, a solution that works is still a good solution. My personal preference is to opt for the solution that works, and work on improving it progressively later step by step.
If the goal is to find new things, then there may be some kind of measure or metric to measure “new”. One concept is the novelty score. Specifically, novelty score assesses from the conceptualisation of the idea to the selection and design of apparatus, and experimental execution, which domain or area is new. Naturally, the more aspects of the research being new, the higher the novelty score.
While the novelty score sounds good, it may negatively impact on the pursuit of good problems in need of engineering refinement or optimisation that can yield a gigantic impact on the world such as improving the charging speed of lithium-ion batteries. In this problem of improving charging speed of lithium-ion batteries, the questions are old, and the testing methods are not new, hence, it has low novelty score and can be disregarded as a “solved” problem not worth working on by Ph.D. students. If this is adopted by the Ph.D. student, did he/she missed an opportunity to work on an important “real” problem where even marginal improvements can have a big impact on the world?
Category: education,
Tags: novelty score, metric, impact, research approach, marginal improvement,
Looking at life with a scientific lens 