Infotech Oulu Graduate School and the Faculty of Technology at the University of Oulu and VTT Technical Research Center of Finland will organize a postgraduate course on

How to Get a PhD: Methods and Practical Hints I–II (2009–2010)

The course is most useful for those active students in the Faculty of Technology who have already a rough idea on the possible topic of their doctoral thesis, or alternatively that of their licentiate thesis. The course can be participated by those students who have a thesis supervisor for postgraduate studies at the university. If you do not yet have a thesis supervisor, you can still start the course, but you will receive the final mark only after you have a supervisor.

The lectures will be organized on Tuesdays starting on 15.9.2009 at 13.15–16 in Linnanmaa. The lecture room will be GO101, see http://www.oulu.fi/kartat/ near the K entrance. You can register to the course by sending an email to Ms. Birgitta Henttunen, email Birgitta.Henttunen(at)vtt.fi. When you register, please give the following information: 1) your surname, 2) your first name, 3) your department, 4) the name of your thesis supervisor, 5) the name of your thesis advisor (the thesis advisor is recommended for everyday guidance especially if you work outside the university), 6) your employer (if different from your department), and 7) your preferred email address. Please register in good time before the start of the course so that we will have an estimate of the number of participants. If you later notice that you cannot participate, please cancel your registration so that unnecessary work is avoided. More information about the course is given by Research Professor, Adjunct Professor (Docent) Aarne Mämmelä, email Aarne.Mammela(at)vtt.fi. He is responsible for the course.

The course consists of two parts: Part I includes compulsory lectures, a small course work, and an exam, and Part II includes a more comprehensive course work, which is an extension of the course work in Part I. Without a topic it is difficult to write the course works, which will be “a quantum jump” towards the doctoral thesis if taken seriously. Part I is equivalent to 3 credits (opintopiste, op) and Part II is equivalent to 5 credits. Part I must be passed before you can get a mark from Part II. Part II is voluntary after Part I. The marks are 1–5 in both the parts. Part I is to cover a postgraduate student’s scientific general studies whose aim is “good familiarity with historical development and basic problems, as well as research and design methods of engineering sciences”, see http://www.ttk.oulu.fi/opinnot. Part II can alternatively be included in the postgraduate student’s major subject. The course is also recommended for thesis advisors.

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Important dates

 

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General contents

We will have altogether twelve lecture sessions (see below) of which seven are compulsory. There will be several invited lecturers who will talk about the exciting task of researchers, starting from the definition of the problem and hypotheses, literature review, experiments and their analysis and discussion, and the publication, which is the definitive output of successful research. If there is no scientific publication, the work was not research but something else. The examples will be taken from engineering and science. There will be also lectures on research ethics and history of research methods. Additional material not included in the exam requirements will be also distributed on this page.

The exam will be based on the lectures (in English). The course work of Part I will be part of the exam. No textbook is used. The lectures will ease also the making of the course work of Part II. The latter will be adapted to the experience of the student and the course work will be closely related to the students’ everyday work, which they should do anyway, but now it will be done in a systematic way even with extra credits. We expect that the literature review will be the first version of the review needed in the final doctoral thesis, but it will be still substantially improved for the thesis. The course will support postgraduate students in their hard but rewarding work towards the Ph.D. degree.

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Program

The program of Part I is shown below. The lecture room will be GO101, see http://www.oulu.fi/kartat/ near the K entrance. The lecture material will be available either in Optima in the folder “Lectures” or on this page. On 20.10.2009 there will be no session due to the autumn break. Changes in the program are possible because of unexpected obstacles. All changes will be announced on the course page.

I Session 15.9.2009 at 13.15–16

1. Aarne Mämmelä, Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Technology. (We will present a brief summary of the requirements for doctoral studies and a doctoral thesis, and its various phases. We will show that the roles of the supervisor, advisor, and student are different. The terms intelligence, creativity, and independence will be briefly explained. The inductive and deductive approaches will be briefly introduced and used extensively in later sessions. The inductive approach is essential for learning, but the deductive approach will strengthen our understanding. Research is a challenging learning process where the solution is not initially known, opposite to learning at school. A bibliography, vocabulary, and chronology of science and engineering will be available on the course page to support learning.)

Additional information

2. Aarne Mämmelä, Literature Reviews: Existing Knowledge from Data Bases. (The use of the most important databases is presented, including digital libraries of papers, abstracts databases, and citation indices. The most important digital libraries of books and bookstores will also be introduced. The publishers and publications will be classified. We will show the strength of using bibliographies, references, and citations in literature reviews. It is also important to know thoroughly the history and terminology of the field. The material must be classified and the relationships must be shown. The essential questions are: what is the state of the art and what kind of development or history lead to it?)

3. Aarne Mämmelä, Final Result: A Scientific Publication. (By far the most common structure of a scientific paper is IMRAD. The acronym comes from the words introduction, materials and methods, results, and discussion. A good paper follows the hierarchical top-down approach and unlike a textbook it is written for experts in the field. The selection of journals and conferences for the manuscript will be explained. When writing the paper, the audience must be taken into account to guarantee readability. In addition, originality, significance, and correctness are essential requirements for a scientific paper, as also explained in later sessions.)

II Session 22.9.2009 at 13.15–16

4. Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Academic Writing.

III Session 29.9.2009 at 13.15–16

5. Aarne Mämmelä, Research Methods: Analytical Approach. (We will discuss the difference between research and development, and between science and engineering. Scientific research is divided into discovery and verification. The research starts with the definition of the problem. After collecting some data, a tentative solution that is also called a hypothesis or system model should be found, implying some kind of causal relationship or correlation between variables. We will present the conventional scientific, analytical, or reductive approach of research. Not all problems can be solved reductively. Therefore a complementary systems approach will be presented in a later session. However, the analysis or reduction has been the reason for the success of the western culture since the 1600’s. Reduction is based on the idea of dividing a large problem into several subproblems that are solved separately using induction, abduction, intuition, imagination, or any other methods of discovery. Scientific theories are shown to be deductive and causal structures having internal and external coherence. Usually in engineering a construction of the system is implemented to show that the theory is “working”. The correspondence of the theory with reality is verified by using the hypothetico-deductive method where some conclusions are deductively derived from the hypothesis and they are compared with reality. In engineering research we start from performance criteria or performance requirements and therefore the hypothetico-deductive method must be slightly modified. Conceptual analysis will be emphasized before theories can be formed. Causality and correlation, deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning, strong inference, and the problem of induction will be explained in detail. Philosophical discussions will improve your awareness of our work.)

IV Session 6.10.2009 at 13.15–16

6. Aarne Mämmelä, Research Methods: Systems Approach. (The systems approach, which is also called the holistic approach, is a complementary approach to the conventional analytical approach described in an earlier session. It is not meant to replace the analytical approach. The systems approach started to develop only in the 1950’s, including systems analysis and systems engineering. It is not yet at all complete due to challenges met. A system is a set of parts so related as to form a whole with a certain purpose. Most man-made systems are hierarchical and modular with a minimum number of interfaces between modules. The fundamental system resources include material, energy, and control information. The aim of a designer is to use those resources as efficiently as possible. It is known that optimization of separate parts does not necessarily result in an optimal system. The performance is usually measured by functionality, reliability, convenience, and price. Systems are difficult to analyze because of the parts with many nonlinear interactions. On each hierarchy level there are some emergent properties that come from the interactions and they cannot be easily explained. Some deterministic systems are even chaotic unless they are designed carefully. The design of systems is not completely sequential but highly iterative. Some examples of fundamental problems will be briefly described. A chronology of scientific and engineering discoveries is briefly presented to demonstrate the importance of the history in improving of our awareness of our work.)

V Session 13.10.2009 at 13.15–16

7. Erkki Oja, Experiences of a Senior Researcher. (A supervisor and advisor of an extensive number of doctoral theses will summarize his experiences at the Helsinki University of Technology and abroad. The lecture is divided into three parts, including how to succeed and fail in a doctoral thesis, what is scientific research, and what is creativity.)

8. Lauri Pirttiaho, Specialist in Industry. (Industrial research today differs in many ways from academic one. Setting of targets is based more on business expectations than advancement of knowledge. Research risk is reduced by “outsourcing” the actual work to research institutions and venture funded start-ups. A researcher in a big corporation follows-up and evaluates the research done by others and recommends on actions. What has been left of the research work is study of applications and feasibility along with lots of issues involving humans interacting in large organizations. This lecture discusses some reasons behind the situation and the current reality of research work in industry.)

20.10. No session

VI Session 27.10.2009 at 13.15–16

9. Harri Haapasalo, Designing qualitative approach in research.

VII Session 3.11.2009 at 13.15–16

10. Olli Silven, Peer Review Process: the Task of a Referee. (The peer review process that guarantees the quality of scientific papers will be summarized. The reviewers are also called referees. The contents and use of a referee report will be explained.)

11. Aarne Mämmelä, History of Research Methods. (The history of research methods is briefly summarized including ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Greece (Thales, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), Arabia (Alhazen), scientific revolution (Galileo, F. Bacon, Descartes, Newton), and modern times (Popper, Kuhn).)

VIII Session 10.11.2009 at 13.15–16

12. Riitta Keiski, Good Practices in Researcher Education.

13. Riitta Keiski, Research Ethics.

IX Session 17.11.2009 at 13.15–16

14. Timo Koivumäki, Quantitative Questionnaire Study.

15. Kari Leppälä, How to Do Scientific Research on Engineering and Technology. (Characterisation of science and technology; their difference; claims and justifications; criteria for truth; technical sciences and extension beyond; constructive method; quest for science of technology; sample template for different research problems.)

X Session 24.11.2009 at 13.15–16

16. Päivi Tynjälä, What on Earth is Learning About? Perspectives into Learning and Research on Learning. (The purpose of the lecture is to open new perspectives about the phenomenon familiar from everyday life to all students, learning. Different conceptions of learning will be described, illustrated and discussed. The lecture will also present pedagogical tools that support learning, and show that the nature of learning process is similar to the research process.)

XI Session 1.12.2009 at 13.15–16

17. Aarne Mämmelä and Olli Silven, Discussion Session. (Students are asked to send questions on research methodology and postgraduate studies by 24.11.2009 to Ms. Birgitta Henttunen, email Birgitta.Henttunen(at)vtt.fi. Alternatively, the questions can be submitted to Optima to the folder Questions. You will need a user name and password in Optima Virtual Learning Environment. The questions are treated anonymously and they are the basis for the informal discussion during this session.)

18. Aarne Mämmelä, Summary of the Course. (A brief summary of the course is presented using the lecture notes and the lectures themselves.)

XII Session 8.12.2009 at 13.15–16

19. A session reserved for one additional lecture.

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Additional material

Course page (for printing)
Evaluation sheet for the course work
Other

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Exam

The exam in Part I will be organized by Aarne Mämmelä. The exam requirements include the lectures. In each exam there will be four questions. In addition, the course work for Part I will be examined and is equivalent to one additional question in the exam. Two additional exams will be organized during the spring. Only those students who have passed the exam are allowed to submit the course work for Part II, but you can start to prepare the proposal and start the preparation of the course work immediately after the start of the course.

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Editorial board

The course is designed and the proposals and the final reports in Part II will be reviewed by an editorial board and some selected additional reviewers. In evaluation a special evaluation sheet will be used, available on this page in the additional material. The members of the editorial board are mentioned below.

• Research Professor Aarne Mämmelä (VTT, Aarne.Mammela(at)vtt.fi), the chairman
• Research Professor Heikki Ailisto (VTT, Heikki.Ailisto(at)vtt.fi)
• Professor Helka-Liisa Hentilä (Department of Architecture, Helka-Liisa.Hentila(at)oulu.fi)
• Professor Harri Haapasalo (Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Harri.Haapasalo(at)oulu.fi)
• Senior Research Scientist Tuomas Ihme (VTT, Tuomas.Ihme(at)vtt.fi)
• Professor Jussi A. Karjalainen (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jussi.Karjalainen(at)me.oulu.fi)
• Professor Riitta Keiski (Department of Process and Environmental Engineering, Riitta.Keiski(at)oulu.fi)
• Professor Tapio Seppänen (Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tapio.Seppanen(at)ee.oulu.fi)
• Professor Olli Silven (Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Olli.Silven(at)ee.oulu.fi).

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Course work requirements

The course works must be new, started after the beginning of Part I of the course. In Part I the course work includes a one-page abstract of the planned work and a list of references that is classified into books, review papers and original papers.

The course work in Part II is an extended version of the course work in Part I and concentrates on literature search, analysis and reporting of the findings, and planning of the postgraduate studies. The course work requirements must be agreed with the student’s thesis supervisor, depending on the earlier experience of the student. Since we request that the student has a supervisor, the latter will have the main responsibility in defining the relevant research problem with the student.

The course work for Part I and the proposal for the requirements for Part II with clear reasons must be submitted to Optima. Detailed guidelines for scientific writing can be found from the lectures, see also the additional material.

Course work in Part I

The contents of the course work for Part I is defined as follows:

(1) Title of the course work including less than ten words, referring to the contents of the course work (not necessarily identical to the final topic of the thesis).

(2) Name of the student, department, employer, thesis supervisor and thesis advisor, and the time when postgraduate studies were started. Please give also the name of the course “How to Get a Ph.D. I” so that we know that you will this time take part only in Part I.

(3) Extended abstract of the work, including a description of the problem and its tentative solution, background of previous work, novelty and significance of the proposed work, the method by which the problem is approached, and principal expected results. Depending of the status of you work you can emphasize different parts. The abstract must be about one page.

(4) List of references, selected carefully and critically, with full bibliographic data and clearly classified into books, review papers, and original papers and including at least 3–5 landmark textbooks, 1–5 review papers, and 10–20 original landmark journal and conference papers.

If you decide to submit a course work proposal for Part II, this material is included there and the relevant parts of the proposal will act at the same time as the course work for Part I. The course work for Part I will be examined after you have taken part in the exam.

Course work proposal for Part II

You can select your approach depending on your background and as agreed with the thesis supervisor and thesis advisor. The course work proposal must be done before the final course work since all students have a different background and they need a different approach which must be adjusted accordingly, and this adjustment must be coordinated. The evaluation of the proposal is also part of the guidance given by the editorial board. The course work about an actual (not hypothetic) research topic should be useful and challenging to each student.

The proposal for the requirements can be rather brief (a few pages only), but should include the following separate parts with suitable headings when appropriate. Parts (1)–(3) and (5) are identical to the course work in Part I. The contents of the proposal are the following:

(1) Title of the proposal including less than ten words, referring to the contents of the course work (not necessarily identical to the final topic of the thesis).

(2) Name of the student, department, employer, thesis supervisor and thesis advisor, and the time when postgraduate studies were started. Please give also the name of the course “How to Get a Ph.D. I-II” so that we know that you will take part in Parts I-II.

(3) Extended abstract of the work, including a description of the problem and its tentative solution, background of previous work, novelty and significance of the proposed work, the method by which the problem is approached, and principal expected results. Depending of the status of you work you can emphasize different parts. The abstract must be about one page at this phase. The abstract will be shortened for the final course work in Part II.

(4) Table of contents of the final report with informative headings (see below the table of contents of the final course work), and a very brief summary of the intended contents of each section, including suggested keywords and the starting point, i.e., an original paper for the literature search (give the full bibliographic data).

(5) List of references, selected carefully and critically, with full bibliographic data and clearly classified into books, review papers, and original papers and including at least 3–5 landmark textbooks, 1–5 review papers, and 10–20 original landmark journal and conference papers.

(6) Biography of the student including 100–150 words, covering degrees and when they were received and on which topics.

(7) Publications that the student has published with full bibliographic data.

If the student has already done an extensive literature search for the Ph.D. thesis, he or she can write a short summary of the literature and emphasize a detailed research plan for the Ph.D. thesis (see the checklist for a doctoral student in the additional material). Please name explicitly all conferences and journals and their deadlines in the plan. If the research plan is too late for the student, the contents must be separately discussed.

Final course work

The final report should include 10–20 pages (excluding the possible figures and tables) with suitably selected headings for the sections. You are encouraged to write the course work with LaTeX, but you can write the work also with other tools. In the additional material you can find information on how to use LaTeX.

Define a research problem, suitable keywords, which are combined with logical operators AND and OR in the literature search, and a starting point (a recent original paper, see below) for your search. Use at least three databases: (i) a large abstracts database, for example INSPEC or COMPENDEX, (ii) an electronic library of a major scientific society, for example IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, or SPIE Digital Library, and (iii) a citation index, for example Google Scholar, SCOPUS, or Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) included in the ISI Web of Knowledge, especially General Search and Cited Reference Search. If the abstracts databases are not available, you can replace them by some other large databases so that the total number of different databases you use is at least three. If you know good authors, use their names as keywords. Try several different keywords, use iteratively both lists of references of papers and citation indices to find the state of the art papers (for example in IEEE Xplore, see the tool AbstractPlus – Citing Documents, valid so far only for new papers; or SCOPUS or Science Citation Index Expanded, see Cited Reference Search). You can find old journal papers from JSTOR and new and old books from Open Library or Amazon. In addition, you can use other databases, see the lectures and the bibliography of a doctoral student in the additional material. The databases are available at least in the following places:

In general, start the search from a recent original paper from the last two years. Use the databases to find the state of the art literature. Make a list of at least 3–5 landmark textbooks, 1–5 review papers, and 10–20 original landmark journal and conference papers classified into these three groups and read them. (A typical doctoral thesis will include about 100–200 references.) Good book publishers include for example McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, and John Wiley & Sons. In addition, journal and newest conference papers of scientific societies such as ACM, APS, IEEE, and SPIE are recommended. Landmark papers are those that are often found in bibliographies, for example in the lists of references of recent books, review papers, and other original papers. In SCOPUS you can select the document type “review”. In SCI-Expanded in the General Search you can select the document type “review” or “bibliography”. In your report, refer only to those references that you have read. We do not request that you read all the pages of textbooks. Refer only to scientific books and papers, and in general do not use references to works that have not been published or refereed or whose contents may change (for example Wikipedia, which is otherwise very useful) so that we do not know which text was cited. Furthermore, do not in general refer to www pages unless the publisher is reliable such as a scientific society.

Organize the material according to the relationships and significance of the original papers by developing a taxonomy or classification. We do not expect that you classify the papers themselves but the topics discussed in the papers. Write a brief summary of the historical progress of the area by reading the reviews of literature in the introduction of recent landmark papers and the citations to some old landmark papers in citation indices. Do not simply copy the sentences from the paper (copyright rules do not allow this), but paraphrase and give the reference. In definitions you can use the original text. Define clearly all new terms, symbols and abbreviations by using dictionaries (see the additional material) and recent publications. For abbreviations, see for example Acronym Finder, www.acronymfinder.com. Excellent examples for review papers are papers in the Proceedings of the IEEE, for example S. U. H. Qureshi, “Adaptive equalization,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 74, pp. 1349–1387, September 1985. An additional example is E. Biglieri, J. Proakis, and S. Shamai, “Fading channels: Information-theoretic and communications aspects,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 44, pp. 2619–2692, Oct. 1998. For good hints on writing the list of references and the biography can be found from the IEEE instructions. You may also use the style of some other scientific society. The contents of the abstract, introduction, and conclusions will be explained in the lectures. A brief summary is in the additional material in the document “IMRAD structure of a paper”.

The final report should include the following separate parts with suitable headings when appropriate:

(1) Title of the report including less than ten words, describing the contents of the report.

(2) Name of the student, department, employer, thesis supervisor, and thesis advisor, and the time when postgraduate studies were started.

(3) Abstract including 200 words and about four keywords below the abstract.

(4) Introduction including a brief reference to the best landmark books, reviews, and original papers.

(5) Problem and hypothesis, including keywords and used databases (you will not need to mention the databases in the final doctoral thesis).

(6) Review of literature, well organized using a taxonomy or classification of the state of the art information, and including a summary of the main historical landmarks of the research area leading to the state of the art.

(7) Research plan, see more detailed instructions on the course page in the additional material.

(8) Discussion and conclusions.

(9) References selected carefully and critically, with full bibliographic data and clearly classified into books, review papers, and original papers and including at least 3–5 landmark textbooks, 1–5 review papers, and 10–20 original landmark journal and conference papers.

(10) Biography of the student including 100–150 words, covering the degrees and when they were received.

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