We’ve talked about the academic research process in this class, but the word research means different things to different people, as well as to different disciplines. For example, research can be used to describe informal searching for information on the internet, but to a scientist, research refers to technical studies done to describe phenomena and to make sense of the world.
The research process we have learned in this class is mostly geared towards research-based writing, which generally means the research papers required in college classes that help students learn more about a topic related to their course. But this process is also used for literature reviews, which are a necessary part of any research conducted.
Literature Reviews
Literature reviews are generally used as the basis for why a study is conducted. It is to show the current state of the scholarly conversation on the topic, and to point out what holes exist in the literature, or what questions are still unanswered that your research would help answer and fill. In this sense, it is the justification for why a study is conducted, and to give background information to the reader that will help them understand the study and its results.
Literature reviews can also be a comprehensive summary of all the literature on a given topic, showing the current state of the scholarly conversation around that topic. This could be the whole subject of the paper. These kinds of literature reviews are a type of research on their own, with their own methodology and process.
When people think about research, they generally imagine the scientific process, which follows the hypothesis, testing, analysis, making observations, and drawing conclusions. While this is true for many disciplines, it is not true for all. Every discipline has their own style of research and relies on different types of qualitative and quantitative data. What is used as a primary source will vary as well. The following table breaks down research for some of the more common, broad disciplines.
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Whatever the discipline, once scholars have completed their research, they then publish or disseminate their research through some other means in order to share it with the academic community, other scholars, or the public in general.