Research

• 1. Introduction

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  The word research first appears in the written record in 1577, borrowed into English from the Middle French recherche, meaning to go about seeking. Behind that act of seeking sits a stubborn old puzzle. Plato, in his dialogue Meno, framed it as a near-paradox. If you already know what you are searching for, why search? And if you do not know what you are searching for, how would you recognize it when you find it? Research is the discipline built to live inside that contradiction. It is creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It collects, organizes, and analyzes evidence to deepen understanding of a topic. What sets it apart is a particular attentiveness to controlling sources of bias and error. So who decides what counts as new knowledge, and how do they prove it? Why do scholars in the arts and the sciences disagree so deeply on what a finding even is? And whose methods get to define the rules of the game?

• 2. Many Kinds Of Seeking

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  Original research, also called primary research, is not built on a summary, review, or synthesis of earlier publications. Its purpose is to produce new knowledge rather than repackage what already exists. In experimental work it leans on direct or indirect observation in the laboratory or the field. In analytical work it might yield new mathematical results or a fresh way into an old problem. The degree of originality is among the major criteria for publication in academic journals, usually judged through peer review. Graduate students are commonly required to perform original research as part of a dissertation.

  Scientific research gathers data while harnessing curiosity, providing theories that explain the nature and properties of the world and make practical applications possible. It can be funded by public authorities, charitable organizations, and private organizations. Its structure tends to follow a recognizable arc. A researcher observes and forms a topic, frames a hypothesis as a testable prediction linking two or more variables, then sets conceptual and operational definitions before gathering and analyzing data.

  Research in the humanities works differently, using methods such as hermeneutics and semiotics. Humanities scholars usually do not chase a single correct answer to a question. Instead they explore the issues and details surrounding it, and context, whether social, historical, political, cultural, or ethnic, is always important. Historical research embodies the historical method, where historians use primary sources and other evidence to systematically investigate a topic and then write accounts of the past. Some studies aim only to examine how behaviours occur in societies, without hunting for the motivations behind them, drawing on approaches such as queer theory or feminist theory.

• 3. When Art Asks Questions

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  Artistic research, also called practice-based research, treats creative works as both the research and the object of research itself. It is a debatable body of thought offering an alternative to purely scientific methods in the search for knowledge and truth. One of its defining traits is that it must accept subjectivity, where classical scientific methods reject it. In that way it resembles the social sciences, using qualitative research and intersubjectivity as tools for measurement and critical analysis.

  The School of Dance and Circus in Stockholm, known by its Swedish name Dans och Cirkushögskolan or DOCH, defined the field as investigating and testing to gain knowledge within and for artistic disciplines, grounded in artistic practices, methods, and criticality. Julian Klein offered a simpler reading, calling artistic research any kind of research that employs the artistic mode of perception. The artist Hakan Topal argued that here, perhaps more than in other disciplines, intuition is used as a method to identify a wide range of new and unexpected productive modalities.

  Patricia Leavy maps eight arts-based research genres: narrative inquiry, fiction-based research, poetry, music, dance, theatre, film, and visual art. The Society for Artistic Research publishes the triannual Journal for Artistic Research, an international, online, open access, peer-reviewed journal, and runs the Research Catalogue, a searchable documentary database anyone can contribute to. In 2016, the European League of Institutes of the Arts launched The Florence Principles on the Doctorate in the Arts. Those principles name seven points of attention that distinguish a doctorate in the arts from a scientific one, and they have been endorsed by AEC, CILECT, CUMULUS and SAR.

• 4. The Shape Of Inquiry

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  The hourglass model gives research its characteristic silhouette. It opens with a broad spectrum of inquiry, narrows to the specific method of the project like the neck of an hourglass, then widens again into discussion and results. Along the way come the major steps: identifying a research problem, reviewing the literature, specifying the purpose, determining specific research questions, and building a conceptual framework that sometimes carries a set of hypotheses. Then comes the choice of methodology, the collection and verification of data, the analysis and interpretation, and finally the reporting, evaluating, and communicating of findings.

  A literature review usually does the quiet but crucial work of exposing flaws or holes in earlier studies, which then justifies the new one. A gap in the current literature, once a researcher spots it, gives birth to a research question, and that question may run parallel to the hypothesis the researcher sets out to test. Yet the steps are not a fixed staircase. They should be seen as an ever-changing iterative process, and some researchers advocate the reverse approach, starting by articulating findings and working back up to the problem that emerges from them.

  Rudolph Rummel set a high bar for confidence, writing that no researcher should accept any one or two tests as definitive. Only when a range of tests stays consistent across many kinds of data, researchers, and methods can one trust the results. The methods themselves take three main forms. Exploratory research helps identify and define a problem, constructive research tests theories and proposes solutions, and empirical research tests the feasibility of a solution using empirical evidence.

• 5. Numbers Versus Meaning

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  Qualitative research is the more subjective, non-quantitative path, using varied methods to collect and interpret data for meanings, definitions, characteristics, symbols, and metaphors. Ethnography, one of its types, centers on the culture of a group, its shared attributes, language, practices, structure, values, and norms. The name carries its purpose: ethno meaning people, grapho meaning to write. Phenomenology is described as a powerful strategy for health professions education and for exploring its most challenging problems. Mandy Sha, writing as a project management professional, argued that a project management approach is necessary to control the scope, schedule, and cost of qualitative work, from research design through participant recruitment, data collection, reporting, and stakeholder engagement.

  Quantitative research asks a narrow question and collects numerical data, analyzing it with statistical methods to investigate quantitative properties, phenomena, and their relationships. Its designs are experimental, correlational, and survey or descriptive, and it is linked with the philosophical stance of positivism. When the research question is about people, participants may be randomly assigned to different treatments, which is the only way a quantitative study can be considered a true experiment. To generalize from participants to a larger population, the researcher employs probability sampling.

  Primary data is gathered specifically for the research, through interviews or questionnaires, while secondary data already exists, such as census data, and it is considered good ethical practice to reuse secondary data wherever possible. Mixed-method research, blending qualitative and quantitative elements, is becoming more common because it offers benefits no single method can. Big data has reshaped the field so that many researchers now spend little effort on collection, focusing instead on analyzing huge amounts of already available information. Set apart from all of this is non-empirical or theoretical research, which develops theory using existing knowledge rather than observation. Much of cosmological research is theoretical, and mathematics research relies on no external data at all, instead seeking to prove theorems about mathematical objects.

• 6. The Cracks In The System

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  Metascience turns research methods back on research itself. Also called research on research, it aims to reduce waste and raise quality across all fields, detecting bias, methodological flaws, and other errors and inefficiencies. Among its findings is a low rate of reproducibility across a large number of fields, the heart of what is known as the replication crisis. Peer review is meant to be the safeguard, a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession, usually done by experts in the same field, consulted by editors, and offered free of charge. That tradition of unpaid review brings its own pitfalls, and it has been observed that publications from periphery countries rarely rise to the same elite status as those from North America and Europe.

  Bias also hides in language and geography. Because the great majority of mainstream academic journals are written in English, multilingual periphery scholars often must translate their work to reach elite Western-dominated journals, and their native communicative styles can be mistaken for incompetence rather than difference. Countries whose official languages are French or Arabic are far less likely to be the focus of single-country studies, and within Africa, English-speaking countries are more represented than others. In comparative politics, Western countries are over-represented in single-country studies, with heavy emphasis on Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, while countries in Oceania and the Caribbean draw very few. Since 2000, Latin American countries have grown more popular as subjects.

  The open research, open science, and open access movements assume that all generally useful information should be free and belong to a public domain, that of humanity. Yet this idea grew out of Western colonial history and overlooks other conceptions of how knowledge should circulate. Most indigenous communities hold that access to certain information proper to a group should be determined by relationships. There is an alleged double standard: digital rights management used to protect personal privacy on social platforms is celebrated, while similar controls used by indigenous communities are denounced as access control and censorship.

• 7. Who Gets To Set The Rules

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  Hua Oranga was created as a criterion for psychological evaluation in Māori populations, built on dimensions of mental health that matter to the Māori people. It names four: taha wairua the spiritual dimension, taha hinengaro the mental dimension, taha tinana the physical dimension, and taha whanau the family dimension. It stands as a direct answer to a problem the field has been slow to face. In many disciplines, Western methods of conducting research are predominant, and researchers are overwhelmingly taught Western methods of data collection and study, which may not be the most accurate or relevant for non-Western societies.

  Simon Marginson argues for the need for a plural university world, suggesting the East Asian Confucian model could take over from the Western one. Funding patterns may decide that contest. East Asian cultures, mainly in China and South Korea, have encouraged increased funding for research expansion, while the Western academic world, notably the United Kingdom and some state governments in the United States, has seen funding cuts that some say could lead to a decline of Western dominance.

  Professionalisation has given research formal job titles. In present-day Russia and some other countries of the former Soviet Union, the term researcher, in Russian nauchny sotrudnik, serves both as a generic label and as a job position within the Academy of Sciences, universities, and other establishments. The ranks climb from Junior Researcher to Researcher, Senior Researcher, Leading Researcher, and finally Chief Researcher. Most funding for scientific research flows from three major sources: corporate research and development departments, private foundations, and government research councils such as the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom. Many senior researchers, including group leaders, spend a significant share of their time applying for the grants that fund their work and serve as a source of merit.