Skip to main content

Originality, Replication and Contribution to Knowledge

Literally, "original" means "initial, first, never having existed or occurred before." But this is not the case for research and this is a serious misinterpretation of the word as it is used in science.

Another inspiring thoughts from Locke et al. (1999):
In research, the word "original" clearly includes all studies deliberately employed to test the accuracy of results or the applicability of conclusions developed in previous studies (page 58).
What is not included...are studies that proceed "mindlessly" to repeat an existing work either in ignorance of its existence or without appropriate attention to its defects or limitations (page 58).
One consequence...is that misguided students and advisors are led to ignore one of the most important areas of research activity and one of the most useful forms of training for the novice researcher -- replication (page 58).
...replication can involve challenging problems that demand creative resolution [to address problems perceived during the replicative study process]... (page 59)
An individual who thinks that truly equivalent conditions can be created simply by "doing it the same way" just has not tried to perform a replicative study (page 59).


Keywords: , , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Padonc's "Bought from Mae Hong Son" T-shirts -- Interesting Souvenir from Mae Hong Son

Padonc's "Bought from Mae Hong Son" T-shirts -- Interesting Souvenir from Mae Hong Son The "I love New York" t-shirt and the series of souvenir was one of my impressive memory from my previous trips to New York City. I got this same kind of impression when I was browsing by the shops by the Jong Kam Walking Street in the city of Mae Hong Son in the second night of the trip. I didn't look at the seller when I caught the sight of these T-shirts. The seller greeted me and, surprisingly, she was P'Kwan, my senior alumni from Chulalongkorn University, who lives in Mae Hong Son and gave me a warm welcome when my family and I went for a dinner at Fern Restaurant in Mae Hong Son town the other night. Note: Pi or P' (its abbreviation) is a Thai word to call an elder sister or brother. Here are the pictures: P'Kwan and Her Shop The T-shirts P'Kwan and the Shop P'Kay, P'Kwan's Husband, at Another Shop Keywords: trips , mae-hong-son , thai
1 comment
Read more

Tip: Converting a CSV File into XML by Excel

I came across a problem to convert a historical data in comma-separated format (CSV) into a modern & more useful XML format. There are many ways to do such conversion. The most obvious one is to do it programmatically by writing a program to read CSV data and exporting it to an XML file by means of the Simple API for XML (SAX) or the Document Object Model (DOM) libraries. But I was too lazy to do it. I knew that Microsoft Excel 2003 supports exporting worksheets into XML data. I tried it out but found that it is not that simple -- we have to define an XML schema and bind each element to each column of the worksheet. So I went on researching. Finally, I found a very useful tool on MSDN: Excel 2003 XML Tools Add-in Version 1.1 ( download ). The Excel Add-in's "XML Tools -> Convert a Range to an XML List" menu command allows us to simply select a range in a worksheet (with or without first row as column names) -- with the advanced options to specify the XML root
Post a Comment
Read more

It’s been eight years and here comes COVID-19 in early 2020

This blog was last posted in 2008 before Facebook and LinkedIn went mainstream. I have since then socialized and posted a lot on Facebook and LinkedIn. During the global COVID-19 crisis in early 2020 people dramatically change the way they live and work since they day I last posted on this blog. They stay a lot at home during the great lockdown to prevent the spreading of the coronavirus. Here is a summary of my online presence: Facebook: http://fb.com/drthitiv LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/thitiv LINE: http://line.thiti.it Bangkok, THAILAND April 22, 2020 
Post a Comment
Read more