Speaker 1: Hi there and welcome to another video from the course where we are learning how to write a proper research thesis. Now in this video I'm going to talk about how to put down the first lines of your paper and also a little bit about literature review and I will try to be a bit more practical in this video so I will really try to show you of some techniques of how to write. So let's go for it. When you will start with writing, first thing what I think you should do is to set up for yourself a Google Drive. It's a cloud-based service and it is for free. Most importantly, it offers us some great services when it comes if you would like to write something and maybe collaborate with someone else. So this is a Google Drive and as you see we can have several types of documents that we can create. You see we have the Google Docs, then we have Google Sheets and then we have the Google Docs. And then we have the Google Docs. And then there is Google Drawings. All three of these are great tools when we are writing a research. So let's go ahead and set up for ourselves a Google Doc. Another great advantage is that maybe you would like to share some parts of your research maybe with your supervisor. As it is on cloud, everything is very simple. So let's start with some writing. So let's call this one a Research Proposal. Now in one of the first videos of this course I have mentioned to you that when we are selecting a research idea, we should try to position ourselves in between some two fields. So let's say that my field one is the field that I'm studying, which is the Business Administration. And then field two is my interest. Let's say it's the Startup World, so Startups. Now I need a research idea. First thing that I will do is that I will visit Google, of course. And let's Google for, let's try Business Problems. Startups, Startups, let's see. As you see, I have been already Googling and let's go for this article. Now I'm simplifying a lot. So you should search for several articles from experts in the field. As you see, this is an article on Entrepreneur, which is giving it some sort of a credibility. So let's see what they are saying. I see these guys listing the actual problems that he believes that startups have. So let's see, failing support, difficulty scaling up, weak team, partnering compatibility, and dwindling cash. Now when you will be searching for these, always keep in mind that you are going to operate in the academic world. And you have to think which of these are going to have some background in the academic world. So for instance, let's say, let's say difficulty scaling up. This would be very hard to cover or back up with some academic literature. So I wouldn't go for that. Then if we would go for weak team, well, that sounds like HR, which is not our field. So let's go for instance for the problems with cash. And from what I know, startups in general are having troubles with setting up a proper pricing strategies. And these are then resulting in some cash problems. So let's say that we have our research idea. It's going to be, it's going to be startups are having hard times. When deciding about pricing strategies, of course, I'm oversimplifying, but I really just want to give you an idea of how to proceed further. Now, when we have this research idea and we have really went through a lot of maybe articles and some blog posts, we will now go and visit the academic world and see what the academics have to say about our research idea. So, most likely you have access to is some sort of search engine of your university. And you have to sort of log in to have access to this search engine because your university is paying the publishers so that the students have access to academic articles. So we have to log in to some portal of your university. So we have our search engine. Now we are going to search for academic articles. So let's say that I'm going to be interested in pricing strategies. And let's see, let's specify the date range. Let's go for, let's go for 2006, 2006. And then what we want to select is peer-reviewed publications. These are the highest in the credibility. These are the articles that we want to go for, the peer-reviewed. Now, let's just hit the search button and see what results do we get. Now, when we got the results, not all of them are going to be functioning. The reason is not all of these are really going to show you what you are searching for or what is listed in this thumbnail. The reason is that sometimes the academic article is published, but then for some administrative reasons, it is turned down. So don't get discouraged when you find something great and all of a sudden you cannot find the actual article. Don't get discouraged about it. I have a strong advice here. When you see these results, always go for the ones, which are saying full text online. And the best is to go for the articles, which are available as PDF, so that you can download them to your computer. Okay, let's say that we go, let's see this one. It looks quite alright. You see 2010. We have the authors here. We can read the abstract and let's go for the full text online. Now, you see we are always redirected to some publisher's website or something like that. And we hit the download PDF. And we have our desired article as a PDF. We want to save it to our computer because later on when you will be writing research, you will be constantly working with these articles. So you really want to have them in your computer. And what's even more optimal is to have on your Google Drive so that you set up yourself a folder, which looks maybe like this. Here I have academic articles. And now as you are searching for the academic articles, you are simply putting them to Google Drive and nothing gets lost. All right, let's say that now we have succeeded in this step and we have several academic articles. What do you want to do next is to set up a new file, which will be the Google Sheets. And this is going to be your overview of let's say literature sources, because most likely you're going to have a lot of literature, a lot of academic articles. So you want to have one document where everything is nicely summarized. Now, let's go to our PDF reader where we have the academic article. But now one important point when you are selecting a PDF reader, select the one that allows you for highlighting. Highlighting looks something like this. We have the function over here so that you can highlight the text. Okay, it doesn't work. You see the highlighting will work on this article. Yes, it works nicely here, but some academic articles are you see improperly formatted. So that you cannot do the actual highlighting. Well, that's just a little bit of problem. Okay, but let's let's keep to what I hope again. And that is having overview of our literature sources. So let's say that we will say author then we have year of publication. Then let's say we put main idea and at the end we put the abstract. Okay, let's try to fill this one in with the two articles. I have by now. Okay. So here the author is Guru Nani and okay, let's go for just Guru Nani. That should be enough Guru Nani and I don't want to waste your time. Year of publication. What do we have? Year of publication is 2001. We see it over here. That's 2001. The main idea of this paper is optimal pricing strategies for internet-based software dissemination. So this is great. Let's say pricing internet-based businesses. Okay, and now usually I also copy the full abstract but from this article, unfortunately, we cannot do it. So just to show you how it's done. Let's go to this article which we can work for and we go here and here we have our abstract but it's bit too long. So let me just highlight this whole part. And we. Put it right over here. Okay, that doesn't work very well right over here. Now when you will create for yourself this nice overview later on it will really pay itself off. So really do this one Google sheet next step is of course reading through the academic articles and we all know that it's not the easiest thing to do. Well, I think all of us know how to read the articles but let me try to give you at least some advice so that you can be maybe. More productive and more efficient. So I have an article here which I feel like is going to be relevant for my thesis. First thing I want to do is to read abstract super carefully because there is a lot of valuable information for me in the abstract especially I will be able to decide based on the abstract whether this article is useful or not useful for me. So let's go to it price is a major parameter that affects company revenue significantly. This is why this paper starts by presenting basic pricing concept and from already the second sentence. I see that this will be a great article for me as I'm trying to sort of examine these basic pricing concepts and I'm trying to apply them into the practice in the startup world. That was our idea that we had now after I have read the abstract. The next thing I want to read is the introduction usually the authors of these articles are putting a lot of valuable information into the introduction. So I can already find things that I will take into my literature review in the introduction. Well, then many people believe that we just continue reading through the article, but I don't recommend it. I recommend once you are done with the introduction go straight into the conclusion because look at it if I would now continue. So here we still have the introduction. We have some nice text over here and all of a sudden I start to come to a analysis and you see this is what you end up quite often with some mathematical formulas, which are for a general and let's say for for a student very often not really understandable. So you would spend a lot of time trying to figure out what these things mean, even though it can be really valuable for our research. It can sometimes take just too much time. So we will rather go straight to the intro conclusion. Which is right over here. And you see we again end up with some nice text, which is easy to read. So we go through the conclusion and again, we find here some ideas that we can take into our literature review. And of course, if we feel like this article is super valuable, then we sort of push ourselves through the analysis and through everything. Next important point when you will be writing a methodology part of your research paper, try to inspire yourself with the academic articles. They often the methodology which is written there can again be very valuable even for you so that maybe you can see, okay, these guys made a multiple case study. We can do the multiple case study as well. So we can get inspired also by the methodology. Next thing what we need to do when we have read couple of academic articles is to structure them. So we are all going to put all of them into our Google Drive. Well, currently it's empty. So I'm going to use my old thesis as an example. When structuring the literature review, don't do it artificially. Don't come to your paper and be like, okay, first part is going to be, let's say, some pricing methodologies, and then second part is going to be something else. No, don't do this. What you have to do is that when you read through, let's say, 30 academic articles, then you start to see patterns. You start to see that five of them belong. Under general pricing strategies, then 10 of them belong under some concrete pricing models for startups, and you can group them together. And that is example of my old thesis. Look what we did. This was the Google Drive folder for it. See, we have the articles, data collection, pictures, seminar. Well, let me give you an example, some again, valuable advice. This folder right over here, never delete anything because sometime later in the research, well, let's say right now you feel like, okay, this academic article is not worth anything. I can just delete it. Don't do it. Rather have it somewhere so that maybe later on when you will figure out that you after all need it, you can come back to it. So don't delete things. Rather put them somewhere on some hidden folder where it might wait for you. Then we had these pictures and this is the great thing about Google Drive. You really can draw some nice pictures. So. Let's go over here. Yeah, you can see that you really can draw original pictures for your research paper. But back to the business and let's go to the articles folder. You see the structuring. We have found four basic groups among the academic articles that we have had. So we have software as a service generally, product management, lead generation and onboarding. And this is what you should do so that your literature review will be structured the way we have assessed generally. Then we have had some product development, development and so on and so on. And I continue and I will be able to lay down some basic structure for my literature review. Okay. Now when we have the basic structure laid down, what we want to do next is to start writing the literature review. Okay, I'm going to give you some example. Let's say that this is article which we feel like is valuable and let's say that we really like this sentence, which is highlighted over here. What I often do is that I will simply copy this text. Let me just take this text which is right over here. I will copy it and let me put it over here. Of course, it's not really nicely formatted because it's taking it from PDF into the word file. And then I just select normal text. Now be careful with the referencing when you are doing this. I mean your your referencing in literature review has to be really strong. So I will not move away from this sentence until I'm sure that my reference next to it is well built. So what I want to do next is to go for reference generator reference generator. And let's say I want to go for APA referencing. I find myself this APA referencing generator and I am going to reference journal article. Okay, and you see you just fill in all the necessary information and it will create the reference for you. So let's try to find all of the necessary information. So I think it will be in the beginning. So the authors are Dolgui A. So we have Dolgui A. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly and then we have Prof and J. Okay. Okay, article title, which one is the article title pricing strategies and models that should be the article title. I put it right over here. Then we have journal title. Hmm. Where is the journal title? I think this is it annual reviews in control. I think that should be it. That should be it. And we have a year of publication. Let's see 2010 2010. What do we have then? Then we have volume which should be 34 30. Oops, 34. Then we should have issue number. Where do we have the issue number? Okay, let's say I don't want to waste your time. So let's just type in 12 for now and pages are I have seen it over here 101 to 110. So we have 101 to 110. Now we just generate this reference. And we have it right over here and you see generates for you already also the in-text citation. So I take this reference and I don't forget to put it into my overview of literature. So let's say that the next column right over right over here somewhere. Let's put it over here. I think you see the pattern that I saving my references also in this Google sheet and I come here and I put the references at the end. Okay, I create separate part of my paper for it. And it's my first reference and I will put the in-text reference right behind the sentence that I have just copied. So in-text reference looks like this. So I take it and come right over right over here. Now, what what should I do with this sentence when I have copied it like this? Well, I usually rewrite it sort of. I would now copy five of such sentences and then in my own words, I am able to construct one paragraph of my literature review. So let's say that right now I have this sentence. Let me just show you how I would work with it. The pricing models are more or less tools to help better understand what dynamic pricing is than something used to solve real-life problem. How would I rewrite this sentence in my own words? So according. Let's do it like this. According, I cannot write anymore. According to Dogui and Prof 2010. According to Dogui and Prof 2010. Pricing models are weaved or should be weaved. Pricing models should be weaved more as a tools. Rather than something solving real-life problems real-life problems and you seen this way. I'm able to construct for myself a paragraph in literature. One small trick that I am doing always when I'm putting in these references and I'm in the process of writing the paper. I just put here sort of three X's like this and I sometimes even highlight it with red. So that then when I'm skimming through the paper or generally I want to make sure that everything is referenced properly. I can press just control F and you see I can find in the document xxx and I will find all the sentences that I have been referencing. So I put these three over there and then of course at the end when I'm handing in the paper. I just delete all of these so I have I hope we went through at least couple of techniques that can be helpful for you when you are laying down your first. Lines in your research thesis and especially the literature review.