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 us in research.
Research diary for documentation
Research diary for reflection
Research diary as a data source
Research diary as undiscovered country
