Key Concepts:

Researching: A close study of a topic or discipline, usually done through a combination of direct inquiry and scholarly investigation, that leads a researcher through a learning process. The goal is to gain a greater understanding of and knowledge about the topic or discipline.

Scientific method of researching: A five-step investigative process that merges (1) observing, (2) questioning, (3) hypothesizing, (4) testing hypotheses, and, if a hypothesis proves reliable, (5) formulating theoretical explanations.

Primary research: A process of direct inquiry in which the researcher notices a phenomenon, gathers information related to it, forms a hypothesis about it, and attempts to evaluate the hypothesis in light of the information and explain the phenomenon. Primary research can embrace experimentation (testing for the validity of a proposed hypothesis), observation (systematically recording phenomena), and interviewing (questioning one or more respondents about certain phenomena) and usually leads to evaluative assessments.

Secondary research: A process of studying and analyzing reports of other investigators' primary research.

Library [research] report: A research document based primarily on secondary research and intended to either inform an audience about a specific aspect of a topic or argue for an original perspective on or interpretation of secondary material.

Card Catalogue: Listings by author, title, and subject of the books a library owns. Libraries catalog by either the Dewey decimal system or the Library of Congress (LC) system.

Government Publications: Documents published by the government and available to researchers at large research libraries or through interlibrary loan and classified using a government-designated system different from the Dewey or LC systems.

Standard Reference Works: Research materials including almanacs, atlases, biographies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, manuals, statistical sources, and yearbooks available for particular subject areas.

Bibliographies and Periodical Indexes: Listings of books, essays, periodicals, newspaper articles, and other research materials for non-specialists and in particular subject areas (e.g., biology, business, engineering, environmental studies, literary studies, psychology, medicine). Indexes appear as both hardcopy texts and as electronic (i.e., accessed through a computer).

Microforms: General term for reduced, photographed facsimiles of printed pages of books, articles, periodicals, newspaper essays, and other research materials in general or particular subject areas. Microforms include microfilm, rolls of 35-millimeter film viewed on an electronic projection machine and microfiche, flat sheets of film viewed on a micro-reader machine.

Interlibrary Loan: A system through which libraries borrow for a limited time books, articles, periodicals, newspapers, microforms, and other research materials from other libraries for researchers' use. These loan services sometimes have a fee, usually for the costs of copying and mailing the material.

Computerized Data bases: Electronically stored files of books, articles, periodicals, newspaper essays, and other research materials in general or particular subject areas (e.g., biology, business, engineering, literature, psychology, sociology, medicine). Computerized data bases include CD-ROM ("compact disk, read-only memory") searches of designated indexes (e.g., Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature) and online, multi-index services (e.g., DIALOG) sold to library patrons by independent distributors.

Internet: An international collection of information services--including databases, interest groups, newsgroups and data-access services--available to users through interconnected computer networks. Individuals located at nodes (access points along the Internet system) talk/ write to individuals, post messages to Usenet newsgroups, join discussions on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and send or receive data as text through Telnet.

A. Just what is research?
Researching requires the same learning processes you use to evaluate issues and to write documents because researching, evaluating, and writing are all investigative processes. But researching goes beyond the skills you need to write. Researching a discipline, phenomenon [i.e., an observable fact or event], problem, or topic, means going beyond your own intuitions and present knowledge. In practice, researching means discovering facts through investigation and scrutinizing the for bases those facts. Researching requires preparation: determining the subject, reader, objective, and scope for the research project and figuring out what and how much information you'll need. It means investigation: ferreting out reputable sources, ideas, and evidence. Researching entails coordination and integration: matching experiment against experiment, result against result, and source against source to arrive at perceptive interpretations. And it requires outlining, drafting, and revising. Researchers are pre-eminently writers: those who claim this title but don't write aren't researchers; they're troubleshooters who can efficiently remedy immediate dilemmas but slight the opportunity to extend theirs and others' knowledge.
No matter what field they're in, active researchers refer to any attempts that lead them to greater understanding of data and phenomena as "doing research." Researchers try unraveling problems by collecting information: they speculate from experiences or study others' descriptions, conditions, explanations, and conclusions reached. "Raw" data, the first-hand information they accumulate, is routinely called primary information and includes findings amassed from experiments, observations, interviews, surveys, and the like. It's unanalyzed information, typically recorded in journals, notebooks, tape-recorded interviews, or unedited transcripts. Secondary information is categorized, appraised data and typically includes judgments published in books, brochures, essays, reports, manuals, or theses.
From primary and secondary data, researchers fashion tentative solutions to the situations or issues and then proceed to test these hypotheses. Doing primary research exercises the same mastery of critical thinking needed to identify and solve almost any problem, and evaluating secondary research demands the same acute critical reading skills required for college courses and professional life. Hence, one way to look at doing research is to realize that every time you read, ask questions, debate ideas, or write about a subject, you're doing research. Likewise, every time you research, you're applying your systematic critical thinking and reading skills.

B. How does one initiate a research project?
When you say to yourself "Gee, I'd like to know more about that," you're aspiring to research. Issues and upsetting concerns are everywhere around you, demanding attention. You start asking questions about an event such as Why did this occur this way at this time? How did this happen? How many times could it happen again? Who was involved with the event? Why did some people seem to be more important than others in this case? What's its significance as an event or phenomenon? Does it compare to similar phenomena? Does it have any broader significance? The bothersome aspects excite your curiosity, and, after you've exhausted what you know about the issue, you go to other sources--either knowledgeable people or printed material--looking for informed explanations. This is self-initiated research of questions you raise that can vary from the mundane to the cosmic and in disciplines as diverse as the theoretical and laboratory sciences to behavioral sciences to the humanities.

Assigned research: Explanatory reviews
You probably will face a situation or question that someone else thinks is important, and you will need to find an answer that resolves the problem with reasoned, supportable arguments. This type of research in colleges is common to anyone who's written a laboratory report or library report and in industry to anyone who's grappled with a feasibility memorandum, proposal, technical description, analysis, or conference report. You will find that research documents typically fall into one of three very broad categories. Some research reports are explanatory reviews: they explain published research, opinions, or facts on a specified topic. These reviews are only valuable if the writer has identified the most important investigations on a topic and interpreted these investigations in ways that highlight any salient connections or controversies. Explanatory reviews report currently accepted wisdom on a topic and are invaluable to researchers needing quick overviews of a subject or topic.

Assigned research: Evaluative arguments
Evaluative arguments, a second type of research report, propose a problem and argue for a particular solution or complex of solutions. Evaluative arguments present the writer's perspective, and their relevance lies directly in a writer's ability to be persuasive. You might, for example, decide that Americans are still divided along the political lines that separated the Union from the Confederacy, and this thesis would become the central argument of your political science report. You may want to point out to the National Science Foundation (NSF) that your original grant was only "seed money" and that you need more funding to complete your investigations. Your implied thesis--that NSF should extend your grant--is based on your evaluation and requires a detailed, factual argument to be convincing.

Assigned research: Explanation-evaluation reports
Most of the time research reports merge explanation and evaluation: they propose a problem, critique relevant research on it, and argue for a solution based on a combination of accepted wisdom, primary and secondary research, and innovative argumentation. The explanation sections of both the Civil War report and the NSF statement acquire their objective tone from a fair review of sources that both support and oppose contemporary positions. Not every college professor or student believes the Civil War was that important, and many researchers heatedly debate--among themselves and in print--the value of certain research projects. A report that combines explanation and evaluation is both objective and persuasive. Most readers expect and are positively influenced by writers who present balanced arguments that include explanations and sufficient primary or secondary research.

Researching and writing
Because researching and writing up your research follow the same fundamental processes of inventing, drafting, revising, and publishing, the same assumptions and warnings discussed in earlier in this handbook hold true. But research writing has a few twists that you may not find yourself using when you write an essay. For instance, like other forms of writing, research writing is not a tidy set of processes that takes you from initial ideas to proofreading. Writing a research report, just like writing any document, requires various invention strategies such as brainstorming or freewriting, but researching also introduces other approaches to gathering ideas--such as consolidating a series of experiments, interviewing experts, compiling bibliographies, and reviewing secondary research--that aren't required for most essays or letters.

With a research report, you may decide you've collected every scrap of data only to find that, as you're drafting, you threw out some investigations you've reviewed or need to interview one more expert, check the procedures on your experiment just one more time, or read a recently published essay on your topic to shore up your thesis. You may find yourself revising while you're drafting an essay, but you may find yourself skipping one or more of these steps at different stages in research writing. For example, as you gather your research, you may be unconsciously shaping that information into a plan and arranging your notes into an informal outline. You won't write a formal outline because you've already organized the material in your mind. Or you may find that you don't need to revise a section of your research report (e.g., a review of current published information) because its purpose and information are immediately clear.

A review section may need only a quick editing for mechanics.

Finally, in research writing you have to keep careful records of whose ideas you're citing, whose words they're stated in, and where others can find the sources. Inadequately recording your research permits others to dismiss your report as sloppy or, worse still, plagiarized. Remember that whatever type of writing you have to do, you still have to prepare adequately, think imaginatively, and confirm your hunches. It's the few twists and criteria particular to research writing that deserve your special attention.