This is the seventh in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and links to the other articles in the series, click here.
If I were a different kind of writer, I’d have titled this piece Five Secrets About Academic Research THEY Don’t Want You To Know!
The truth, though, is that while there are many things that are useful to know about academic research and they can make it a whole lot easier to navigate if you happen not to be an academic yourself, none of them are exactly secret. “Hidden in plain sight,” perhaps, but that’s about it. Academics, being immersed in it, often don’t realize it explicitly, but like any other culture or country (and academia has aspects of both) academia has rules and customs and so does its literature. If you’re going to visit, it’s helpful to know what they are.
The truth is, academic literature is a far more predictable and transparent genre than non-academics tend to imagine, and a lot easier to use than its reputation often suggests. The subject matter of any given piece of academic research may be neither predictable or transparent, and it is difficult to exaggerate the tendency of academic writers to produce convoluted and difficult prose. But navigating the literature itself isn’t all that tricky, and it’s easier to figure out what a piece of academic research is telling you if you’re not also struggling with the genre itself: hence this article.
Five major philosophical principles shape (and have always shaped) all academic literature:
Academic research is a conversation.
Always show your work.
Any sufficiently interested reader should be able to reproduce your research.
It matters whose company you keep.
Formality is a convenience.
Academic research is a conversation.
Academics began to write up their research for the simple reason that writing things down lets you transport ideas from one place or person to another in ways that verbal transmission alone does not. Writing things down also has the inestimable advantage of letting ideas and information be saved and used later on without their being subject to the vagaries of the human memory. Scholars as far back as the ancient world thus adopted writing as their preferred method of communicating with other scholars: if you could write things down it didn’t matter where those other scholars were or when they encountered your work, so long as they could still read it, understand it, and use it. Reading the work of other scholars has, as a result, quickly became not just a one of the ways people obtain academic information, but the primary way.1
As scholars read and learn, they also comment, query, critique, synthesize, and explore. In my own research as an historian, I’ve been fascinated to follow some of the conversations between generations of scholars of gynecology, some of them stretching back in time to the 4th and 5th centuries BCE, with ancient physicians doing the equivalent of leaving comments on one another’s blog posts. In a lot of ways, academic literature is a fair bit like the Internet: innumerable people all contributing to wide-ranging, physically decentralized and chronologically asynchronous conversations about topics that can get very specific indeed, made possible by particularly robust and adaptable communication technologies (writing and printing).
Remarkably enough, this is still true. Academic research in any field, on any subject, is a conversation between dozens or hundreds or even thousands of scholars. They may not know one another personally (their lifetimes may not even overlap in some cases, let alone their physical locations!) but they know one another’s thoughts and observations via their written work. In exactly the same way that you or I might say that we know Oprah Winfrey because we’ve watched her on TV for years, or we know Agatha Christie because her novels are among our comfort re-reads, academics “know” their fellow scholars via their bodies of work.
What’s more, while there are certainly plenty of factions within academe, and it’s quite commonplace for people to have strong feelings about which scholars they think have gotten it right about any given topic, academics make fewer grand claims about Having The One True And Correct Answer than most non-academics would believe.
There’s a big difference between being a learner, and therefore someone whose job is to assimilate and recall the information they’re taught, and being an academic whose job is to explore a topic and see what they can find out about it. Learners are expected to have a lot of answers while academics are expected to ask a lot of questions.
It is, of course, by learning the basics — the answers — that one gains enough knowledge to start asking questions. That’s the process of typical primary and secondary education. This is why it comes as such a shock to so many people to find out that academic research isn’t just more of the same, but instead more of a conversation in which ideas and interpretations and information are repeatedly played with, explored, expanded, questioned, denied, affirmed, and reinterpreted.
What this means for you, the non-academic who is dipping a toe into the waters of academic research for their own information-gathering purposes, is this: no piece of academic research is ever the last word on a subject.
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