Research Diary

Why & When

When conducting research, being reflexive and documenting your own progress can be very helpful. If you procrastinate, then this is for you. So basically, it is for everybody. As an active researcher, it is not only important to track your progress, you also have document it, and ideally reflect about it. This can be of specific importance for early career researcher who face their first large challenge, like writing a thesis or publishing a paper.

Goal(s)

Document your research process thoroughly, not only how you conduct research, but also how it made you feel while you were conducting it. Different people get different facets out of keeping research diary, but people highlighted in the past, that it ca 1) Provide a basis to find your own style of documentation 2) Helps you to reflect on your timeline, goals and progress 3) Generates an understanding about the personal mindest in which the research was set and conducted 4) Continuous writing improves your writing per se- hence your academic writing may also improve over time.

Getting started

Getting started is the hardest point of any research diary, or better, getting started and sticking to it. You need to design a time and ideally even a place where you want to document your research and reflect about it. Bullet journaling has introduced fancy litte A5 journals into the life of many people, and such a book could be a good start. What is most important is that no setting is ideal for everybody, you have to find your own setting. Some write in the morning before the day gets started, some write at a fixed time in the office, others use the calm in the evening, and even other write whenever ad wherever they feel like it. We have to be aware that writing a research diary should be a committed goal if we decide to do it, and it needs to be a habit. Naturally, hair changes need time, thus starting small may pay off if it is nevertheless continuously. While a diary may help us to write down how we perceive reality, a research diary helps us to write down how we perceive research, and how we perceive ourself in research.

What to write in a research diary

The core goal of research diary is to document your own research and how you perceive it. While for instance the late Oliver Sacks started a new book every few weeks at time, other may just document the main steps. What is relevant is that you take a step back and and look at your research like an outsider, but with insider knowledge. It take trying to uncouple oneself from the own research process, yet it is well worth it. In the following are some reasons how a research diary has proven valuable in the past.

Research diary for documentation Documentation is key in science. While a certain systematic way of documentation has established itself over the last decades, the latest data security laws have put a burden on many scientists when it comes to the proper documentation of science. Although this was done with the best of intentions, a clear documentation considering all legal necessities is hard to achieve yet of course necessary. Here, a research diary can open another level, where beside the "objective" documentation of what was done in due course of our research, a personal perspective prevails. Why did we make certain choices in our research, and how did we feel about it. Having the possibility to come back to this can prove valuable, since our memories are deeply constructed and often plain wrong.

Research diary for reflection

Research diary as a data source

Research diary as undiscovered country

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