Why do academic research

Answer: It really depends on your interests and if you are doing it as a student or as an independent researcher. Otherwise, you should talk to a teacher or superior to help you figure out what research topic you would like to explore.

Answer: Historical research helps verify certain facts and information about a topic. There are others reasons why it is undertaken. I suggest that you use academic websites to help you answer your question. Having a laptop or desktop computer or a smartphone that has access to the Internet and printing machine can certainly help you:. It is also helpful to have a school library card or resident identification card that you can use to access books and other materials in a nearby community library.

If your research involves interviewing people, then a tape recorder or digital recorder would be useful. I may have missed several other objects, so please do further research to help you answer your question. Answer: Though my hub does not talk about how to write a research proposal and a good one at that , I suggest that you ask yourself what topics would you like to examine further.

For instance, if the field is broad like health, then list down health-related topics that you find interesting. Choose issues that you would like to explore. Why more than one? Just for contingency in case, the others seem harder to do, if not impossible. Some organizations ask for monitoring, evaluation, and sustainability plans. There are also agencies and assessors who are meticulous when it comes to the use of the English language, particularly grammar and spelling.

Thus, you might want to hire a professional editor and a proofreader to help you polish your research proposal. Otherwise, there are online materials that you can use to help you improve your English writing skills. I hope you will find this response somehow useful. Otherwise, please conduct further research on what makes "a good research proposal. Answer: I suggest that you invest time and effort in learning about statistics and statistical analysis. You may also look for experts, academics, or professionals who are adept at statistics and quantitative research.

You may ask them if they are willing to mentor or guide you as you work on your study. There are also free online courses on statistics and quantitative research that you may use to help you complete your research.

If there is ample time and also budget , please share your findings with your survey respondents prior to finalizing your study. It is part of research ethics to do this part because it aims to: 1 inform your respondents about the results of your study, 2 get their feedback, and 3 thank them for their participation and helping you finish your research.

Answer: The key figures in doing research are the researcher, the study participants, and the funding agency, if applicable.

Ver relevant reference. The research environment is well-explained. I wanted to read more when I have time. Congratulation to the author s. I read your article and found it interesting and helpful. As a research coordinator, I am currently preparing a research manual for our students.

May I ask permission to include or cite the 7 importance of the research you've mentioned in your article. I came across this article in search of difference between pure and social science researches. And I really found it very useful in such a way that it gives me different view of how fashion-out my own research on impact of wall gecko in some local government areas of my state.

I really gained more insight on how mine should be designed base on the purpose and objectives. Thank you so much for allowing all without restriction to benefit from the vast research understanding you acquire and shared free for all. Thank you to sisay solomon, ayuen akau, and Kukil Rabha for reading my hub and for posting a comment. It's amazing sir, thanks for the hub. It helps me to better understand the need of research. You have done great job here and it's very helpful to my current research.

God bless you real good and give you more wisdom and grace. Digitemie-Batubo Beleudaara on September 16, Thank you very much for this piece of information about research, I was totally stuck not knowing what to do but this has helped me allot.

Thank you for reading and appreciating my hub, Jackson Muhingi, Atuhaire Macmillan, mossessjeremiah, Rehana, and Zubee. Many thanks Zarah for taking your time to respond to the multiple quiz shared, indeed they are very informative and a guide to a number of concerns regarding research.

Really appreciate. Thank you for reading my hub, Crystalquintero. I appreciate your kind words. May your awareness and understanding of social issues continue to enrich your life and your relationship with other people.

Thank you Patricia A. Tusay and Chelsie Vizcarra for reading and appreciating my hub. May you succeed in your future research endeavors and in your journey as a hubber. The one that best resonated with me and my life the most was 2 as I have always found myself trying to look out for others before myself.

I think it matched well with me because I tend to lean towards the morality aspect and how it affects others. I agree that reason 2, for the most part, does that. This hub is really helpful I took pleasure in taking the time to read it.

The one I enjoyed the most was number 7 about nourishment and exercise for the mind. This one I felt most connected to because as a student I am still improving my research skills. I agree that curiosity is what fuels the mind to seek for answers. Especially nowadays when you can basically research about anything on the internet. I really enjoyed reading all the reasons for doing research.

I especially liked number 4. This one was about learning the truth and facts. It is very important to know what all the facts are today since everyone is talking about fake everything. I really appreciate for your posts and today i have ideas on the importance of educational rasearch. God bless you all! Thank you for sharing your knowledge to us author! Claps for you! This article really helps me! Continue writing! Now I have understood what research is and it's main objectives, the reasons for carrying out research.

I love it thanks. Thanks for reading my hub, Annacky A. Educational research is important in education because it is conducted in order to provide reliable information regarding educational issues and their solutions. Yes, Kate Tr, you and your team may use reason 7. Good luck on your presentation and may you inspire your workshop participants to engage in research.

I'm really impressed with the words that you has written. That is so clear and easy to understand. My team from Vietnam is going to have a workshop about researching skill next month so i want to ask for your permission to use the point no. We just want to take notes and a quote from it and give the link of the articles in the reference. Research is very important because no research carried out society will remain where they were before to mean there is new discoveries and the problems in the society will not answered.

As for your comment, Christyluv, there are in-text citations in some parts of the article. The insights and tips given are based on my experience as a researcher. Research Why Do Research? Why Do Research? Why should you consider getting involved in research and creative scholarship: Gain hands-on experience completing a research or creative project.

Work closely with a faculty mentor and have the opportunity to connect with other faculty and other student researchers who work in your area of interest. Hone your leadership and teamwork skills as you collaborate with others. Gain academic credentials that will help create a well-rounded resume, publishing your work and working with a research team.

Learn valuable life skills for life and class such as professionalism, time management, learning how to use online research tools. Learn valuable skills for life and class professionalism, time management, multi-tasking, online research tools.

There is no common narrative, instead just the methods, facts or data and conclusions are presented. The technical jargon of that discipline, such as chemistry, or their industry is used as well. The whole goal of the academic writing style is to articulate exactly what was done and exactly what was found. These articles are very straight-forward to read, especially if you understand that area of expertise and its technical words.

The writing style is important to keep the validity of the research and the article intact. The better written the article, the more likely it is to be published which is the whole goal. An important aspect of a legitimate journal article from an academic research project is peer review. When a research project or research article has been peer-reviewed it means that the procedures and findings have undergone intense scrutiny by others who are already familiar with the topic and been found to be valid.

This process can look different depending on the specific field the research is being done in and where it is being done. But the process always takes place before the research is presented in an academic journal. The paper is submitted to various peers and experts in the same field. They review the case, research, and findings and give recommendations for edits before it is published.

When an article has been peer-reviewed, it shows the reader that the findings being presented are valid. The peers or experts who are reviewing are looking for how valid the findings are and also whether the information can be trusted. They may suggest taking out parts that are not helpful or for changes the make the paper more insightful.

And they may point out problems with the methods used and suggest ways to fix them. A peer-reviewed academic article is typically viewed as more trustworthy than an article that was not peer-reviewed. Academic research involves a few different people and groups every time. Each group is necessary to make the research effective. The first person is the researcher. This is the person or group conducting the experiments and writing the articles. The next is the university or the organization sponsoring the research.

And last is the publisher, which is the academic journal that will distribute the academic article. These three groups rely on each other to be able to meet their individual needs within the research realm. The researcher needs a reputable publication to publish their academic paper to make it legitimate. Academic publications need researchers who do interesting work. They all work together to bring innovation and increase knowledge. Okay, so now that we understand a little bit about what research is and how it works.

Now, why is it important for each of us. This is a very clear indicator of how important research is. But if the correlation is 0. We worry about the reliability of this data, which is purportedly from , and would like to find a better source, but so far it is the only one we have found.

We can also get a sense of how important IQ is in a field by looking at the age of peak performance in that field. Since IQ declines sharply with age, fields where researchers make their biggest breakthroughs early in their careers are likely to rely more on intelligence — in physics and pure mathematics, the age of peak output is around 30, for example, suggesting intelligence is highly important for contributions in these fields.

In medicine and history, by contrast, the age of peak output is closer to 50 — suggesting that accumulated knowledge and effort play a much larger role in making contributions to these fields.

Psychology falls somewhere in between. This suggests that success in academic research may depend to a large degree on your ability to work in focused ways over long periods of time, with good feedback — which may in turn depend on your interest in and motivation to sustain work in an area, and your ability to find others to learn from.

But it may be that even this is not sufficient for just anyone to achieve excellence — you may still need to start out with certain genetic predispositions. Rather, there may be a number of important composite factors — both intellectual and personality characteristics — which are at least partially genetically determined, and which contribute significantly to scientific achievement.

Another meta-analysis of studies of academic achievement looked at the predictive power of the personality construct Typical Intellectual Engagement TIE — a measure of enjoyment of intellectually demanding activities — alongside intelligence and effort. They found that intelligence accounted for the greatest variance in academic achievement, but that the combined effects of TIE and effort equalled those effects of intelligence. Finally, we expect that advancement in fields which require managing teams of young researchers and applying for grant funding will benefit from strong social skills.

During your undergraduate studies, aim to complete at least one summer research project. This could also be a good time to consider a research assistant position or pre-doctoral fellowship, which can allow you to work in a research lab and test your fit for academia while also sometimes allowing you to take classes at your host institution, without committing to a PhD.

At that point, if you still think academia is for you, then apply to graduate studies. For graduate schools in the US, you have to take the GRE Graduate Record Examinations , and your scores in this also provide some indication of potential — a meta-analysis found that GRE test scores predict grade point averages in graduate school, faculty ratings, citation scores, and later career research productivity. During your studies, you might be able to experiment with some internships on the side, to keep learning about alternative options.

For example, as a graduate student you might be able to get internships in government, think tanks, or industry, depending on your field. Near the end of your PhD, you face a key decision-point: will you continue?

This is a good opportunity to re-assess your fit. You can also apply to postdoc positions to see what you get. In our individual profiles on specific fields, we discuss specific signals of potential at this point — but the conventional advice is that you i have some reasonably good publications ii have an offer to do a postdoc at a top research centre. The next reassessment point is when you start applying for permanent positions.

See what you get, and if in doubt, continue with academia. People on the academic track are not taught about, nor encouraged to value, options that compete with academia. Balancing your personal fit against the importance of the field is difficult. On the one hand, especially when you take into account the other ways to have an impact in a field — e. Most people might therefore benefit from considering a wider range of options of academic fields early in their career, and avoid being pigeonholed in a specific area.

One strategy would be to first narrow your options based on which fields seem relevant to solving important problems, and then choose from those already-filtered options based on personal fit. If you think you have a good chance of excelling in a field, but are less sure how valuable progress is in that field, one question to ask yourself might be: how valuable does cutting-edge research in this field seem to be right now? More generally, we suggest choosing a field by first asking what global problems seem most pressing, and then which fields of research seem most likely to contribute to solving those problems.

You could look at our current list of pressing global problems and how we think about choosing cause areas to get more ideas. You might also ask yourself whether developing expertise in this field might allow you to apply that expertise to solve problems outside of academia.

For example, you might aim to develop expertise in food science in order to develop meat substitutes, or in biotechnology in order to better understand and improve biosecurity.

See examples of potentially high-impact research questions in different fields to get a feel for what high impact research in different disciplines might look like. Some academic fields will have much better backup options than others — lots of jobs value applied quantitative skills, so if you study a quantitative subject you may be able to transition into work in effective non-profits or government.

A history academic, by contrast, has fewer clear backup options outside of academia. At the beginning of your career, most of the academics we spoke to recommended focusing on developing expertise and building up a good track record of publications. A good publication record will be essential for you to get the best academic jobs and funding later on, which in turn will give you the freedom to pursue whatever research questions you think are most important.

The best people to learn from are likely to be those who you think are doing good work on important questions. If you want to have a big impact through your research in the long-run, it seems important to spend at least some time early in your career on projects you think could be extremely valuable. There are lots of things which set us up to be in positions to do valuable research. One of them is having a recognition that you are an established thinker in this field and that what you have to say is going to be worth listening to.

Another is just having well calibrated ideas about what is going to be valuable to work on. I think that choosing particularly important research questions is a skill.

They are likely to build expertise in topics, which are really crucial to the things that they think are important. Then you can still spend a lot of your time on working out, okay, how do I actually just write good papers in this topic?

I think that there is a cost. I think that a lot of academic advice is generally standardized to trying to help people maximize the chance of a successful career for them in a personal sense [rather than for social impact]. Read more in our full interview with Owen. This raises an important point — in order to do important research, you need to spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about what questions are important.

As we mentioned previously, even within a field that seems highly relevant to important problems, some research questions will be much more valuable than others. There can also be a tendency in academia to focus on very narrow areas. That makes it easier to explain what your specific area of expertise is, but it also leads to a lack of big picture thinking.

How can you ensure you focus on important questions throughout your academic career? When thinking about how to choose research questions within a field, you can use the same framework we use to think about cause areas: looking for questions that are important, tractable, and uncrowded. Here are some rules of thumb, based on the advice we heard in our interviews with top scientists, which may help you to identify high impact research questions:.

For example, global health research gets quite a bit of attention, but an extra researcher could still do really valuable work on developing treatments and vaccines, especially if focused on more neglected areas. Focusing on big problems that seem tractable, and then looking for neglected areas within those areas could be a good approach.

Bring new skills, perspectives or technology to an important area — for example, Daniel Kahneman brought findings from psychology to economics and ended up winning a Nobel Prize. Ask other experts in the field what they think the most important questions are like Hamming — academics who have a lot of experience in a field might be better able to spot important, neglected areas. However, the opposite could also sometimes be the case — if a professor has built their career working in a niche area, then they may well have a bias towards thinking that area is disproportionately important.

If you can find more experienced researchers who seem to have thought hard about the most important questions in their field, learning from them could be really helpful. Your opportunity to make a difference via these different routes will depend a lot on your personal strengths, preferences, and the specific opportunities in your field. Perhaps the best way to maximise your impact in academia beyond research is to stay open to all these possible paths early on, and spend time exploring different opportunities early in your career to learn where you can have the most impact.

For example, during a PhD or postdoc, keep an eye out for opportunities to communicate your research for a popular audience, and see whether you enjoy and are good at communicating complex ideas simply. If you notice that other academics in your field or department seem to be applying their research beyond academia — advising companies or government, or involved in building products — then talk to them about how they got into this area.

Some companies and parts of government also offer internships specifically for PhD students, which could be a great way to explore the potential to apply research from your field outside of academia. This is because being successful in advocacy, as a governmental advisor or other similar paths, requires you to both have genuine expertise and strong credentials.

On the other hand, most people who set out to become academics will not make it, as the impediments to reaching a position in which you have discretion over what you study are substantial. But for those who have the intelligence, conscientiousness and curiosity to succeed, working in academia provides an unusual opportunity to work on the problems they think are most pressing in the world — at least so long as they can find grants to fund them and journals to publish in.

Those who are interested can learn more about specific PhD options and find interviews with academics discussing how the path has worked out for them in the Further reading section. We can offer introductions and funding opportunities, or answer specific questions you might have. If you think you have what it takes, apply for our free coaching service.

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