Vol. 23 - "More research is needed"
“More research is needed” — OK, but which one?
There is a very specific turn of phrase that I see in students’ writing (especially undergraduates), and it goes: “more research is needed”.
And I don’t like it.
And I know the world is on fire, and I am taking 45 minutes to think and write about the most innocuous, least-important problem on my list today. Complaining about undergrads’ writing habits is self-care.
When giving students a few articles to discuss and encouraging them to provide a synthesis, it is very common that their conclusion will be that some uncertainty (or disagreement) remains about whatever the papers are about. This is the point of writing papers: we are trying to figure out difficult things, and the answer is often incremental, unsatisfying, or imperfect.
That more research is needed is not a radical conclusion as much as a given because this is the purpose of research: to do more research so that we ideally become less ignorant, or more realistically become more efficiently ignorant, about our topic of choice.
The difficult part of the job is to figure out which additional research is required. And the reason it is so difficult is that it requires a thorough understanding of the history of ideas. Picking out the next progressive research question requires a good knowledge of what the big question was last year, five years ago, and earlier than that.
But even this answer — students will stop writing “more research is needed” when they will understand the long-term dynamics of the field — isn’t satisfying. Students are taking many classes, and it is unrealistic to expect them to care about the history of ideas in all of them (I don’t! It’s fine! Curiosity is a resource that we must spend wisely!).
Instead, I want to start thinking about the knee-jerk reaction of calling for more research as an opportunity. Specifically: what if we can turn this into an exploration of what the story of the field is? Why were the authors asking these questions in 2014? Why does it not agree with this 2023 article? Or this 1996 one?
Often, that studies provide conflicting answers is not a sign that we are using different tools, or different methodologies, or that one of them is wrong. We are, collectively, framing our work within big, field-wide questions, that are changing very rapidly.
“More research is needed” is good, in a sense. It is students realizing that the process of discovery does not end, and that our answers are mostly very good guesses that create some new uncertainties. And hopefully, once I surmount my frustration at this being the end of the reflection, I will manage to turn this into a teaching moment.
Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash