A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018

What research is
What research is and how researchers think about it
Research and writing

1.1 What Research Is

1.2 How Researchers Think about Their Aims

1.3 Conversing with Your Readers

Whenever we read about a scientific breakthrough or a crisis in world affairs, we benefit from the research of others, who likewise benefited from the research of countless others before them. When we walk into a library, we are surrounded by more than twenty-five centuries of research. When we go on the internet, we can read the work of millions of researchers who have posed questions beyond number, gathered untold amounts of information from the research of others to answer them, and then shared their answers with the rest of us. We can carry on their work by asking and, we hope, answering new questions in turn. Governments spend billions on research, businesses even more. Research goes on in laboratories and libraries, in jungles and ocean depths, in caves and in outer space, in offices and, in the information age, even in our own homes. Research is in fact the world’s biggest industry.

So what, exactly, is it?

1.1 What Research Is

You already have a basic understanding of research: answering a question by obtaining information. In this sense, research can be as simple as choosing a new phone or as complex as discovering the origin of life. In this book we use research in a specific way to mean a process of systematic inquiry to answer a question that not only the researcher but also others want to solve. Research thus includes the steps involved in presenting or reporting it. To be a true researcher, as we are using the term, you must share your findings and conclusions with others.

If you are new to research, you may think that your paper will add little to the world’s knowledge. But done well, it will add a lot to your knowledge and to your ability to communicate that knowledge. As you learn to do your own research, you also learn to use and judge that of others. In every profession, researchers must read and evaluate the work of others before they make a decision. This is a job you will do better after you have learned how others judge yours.

This book focuses on research in the academic world, but every day we read or hear about research that affects our lives. Often we get news of research secondhand, and it can be difficult to know what reasoning and evidence support a claim. But research doesn’t ask for our blind trust or that we accept something on the basis of authority. It invites readers to think critically about evidence and reasoning.

That is how research-based writing differs from other kinds of persuasive writing: it must rest on shared facts that readers accept as truths independent of your feelings and beliefs. Your readers must be able to follow your reasoning from evidence they accept to the claim you draw from it. Your success as a researcher thus depends not just on how well you gather and analyze data but also on how clearly you report your reasoning so that your readers can test and judge it before making your claims part of their knowledge and understanding.