Research Methods for Eliciting e-Research User Requirements

e-Research is a relatively new and expanding means of undertaking multi-disciplinary on-line research. As such, the needs and requirements of the e-Research community are not yet fully understood and it is evident that it needs further investigation and study. This paper aims to provide basic guidance on the research methods that will be useful in order to gather information from the users of multi-disciplinary e-Research-based projects. The paper discusses quantitative and qualitative research methods with examples that have been drawn from social and computer science. We show that there are many ways of gaining information from users, but when used appropriately qualitative methods give more depth of information, whereas quantitative methods are scalable to the whole community.