Researching “Research”
As researchers, we often wonder if what we are working will be beneficial. Additionally, we wonder if our limited time should be spent on one topic vs another. Over the upcoming months, I will be analyzing this problem and presenting possible solutions.
I will be working with Bill Tomlinson at UC Irvine on a new project called ResearchWatch. We are effectively researching “research.”
Our first goal will be to analyze the distribution of research today. We want to see which topics are at the heart of research and which are being possibly ignored. Could these ignored topics warrant more interest? Are the over-researched topics unnecessary?
We will be specifically analyzing the NSF Research Grant dataset for the past 10 years. We will cluster these into topics using various unsuprvised learning algorithms. This will give us a high level mapping of what the NSF has considered to be important to warrant research grants. Stay tuned for future updates…
Thanks to Amazon for supporting the academic community. They have provide us with a grant for various AWS services. Check out their recent blog post if you are a researcher and need a base of operations.