Research Methods

Although I am just a beginner in academic research, I have come to think that current research methods must be different from those in the past. Since I am doing document research, this posting exclusively deals with document research among other things. The most impressive thing is penetration of computers and Adobe Reader in document research. Also, rapid development of the search engines is tremendous. Just putting a few keywords, we can find a number of candidate documents which have relevance to what we are researching. After down loading several documents in PDF format, we may find spesific parts in each document with search function attached to Adobe Reader without reading the whole document. This can significantly help us save time in going through documents. However, I have come to think of a question if it helps improve quality of our research? Because I am in between classical belief in labour intensive activities and highly developed information technologies, I have been impressed with easiness of gathering information at the same time feeling something sceptical about how much sufficiently readers may understand what the authors mean in respective articles. We must secure evidence as much as possible. But, the quality of research must not be in proportionate relation to the number of articles we put in the bibliography. The technique in how to find as many relevant documents as possible in a given time frame is important. However, I do not believe that quality of document research can be determined by the number of documents searched. In a master level programme, we are required to do several tasks such as document research, presentation, and class discussion. It must mean that participants are required to develop each of those capacities, and talented people will properly assess what the participants have acquired. Though I myself do not care so much about those assessments, I cannot help wondering if the participants can be expected to bring about any better social change than we see now through what they will have learned through highly electronically developed research methods.