What is Academic Research, and Why is it Important?

Introduction

Earlier, we defined academic writing and critical thinking. We explained that academic writing reflects the academic discourse community’s goal to produce and share knowledge. In this chapter, we will continue our discussion of academic writing. We will define academic research and examine its importance for broader society and you as an undergraduate student.

What is Research?

One of a university’s most important purposes is to discover new things about our world and share this knowledge with others; this is called research. We can define research as the systematic process of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating information to understand a specific topic better. Academic research helps society to make decisions to improve lives. The results of research conducted at universities impact every aspect of your life. For instance, you are accessing this textbook on a device that is the product of academic research on computing equipment, software development and programming. We have also used academic research on writing instruction and online learning to help us design this textbook.

Who Does Research?

Many people at the university are involved in research. When not teaching, many of your professors work to generate new knowledge in their specialty fields. They design original research studies according to the standards of their discipline, present their findings at academic conferences, and publish their results, usually in scholarly journals. They may have research assistants who assist them with their research and writing. These research assistants may be graduate students who have completed an undergraduate degree and decided to continue their studies in Master’s or doctoral (Ph.D.) programs.

How do Researchers Work Together to Build Knowledge?

Researchers work in communities to collaboratively build and assess knowledge. Each academic community develops standards to evaluate research processes and outcomes. When your professors submit their research articles for publication, they undergo a rigorous peer review process. Their work is sent to several other experts in the field, and these experts make sure that the research is sound and worthy of publication. This process usually involves extensive revisions to the research article to ensure its high quality. Each publication or research study adds a very small piece to our understanding, and communities of researchers look for patterns of results across many studies to build a consensus about what they are uncovering about the world.

How do Your Undergraduate Writing Assignments Relate to Research?

As undergraduate students, you may not get a chance to do original research, but you will read the research of others. You will learn to engage with this research critically by questioning, analyzing, interpreting, and synthesizing it. Often, the writing your professors ask you to do relates to the research writing they use to communicate their research to their peers. For instance, the lab report you write in your first-year physics class is a training form of the common research article your professor writes to communicate their research findings to their academic peers.

For this reason, your writing at university will differ greatly from your writing in high school. You are writing for a new audience—academics interested in learning new things about the world, for new purposes — demonstrating critical thinking, and in new genres that reflect the goals of various discourse communities at the university, such as nursing, sociology, or history. Many of your writing assignments will integrate findings from the research articles published by academics like your professors. Finding, analyzing, summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating these sources into your writing takes more work and planning than you may be used to. You will write longer papers, and this means that you will have to reconsider the strategies you use for essay structure. Five paragraphs and the five-paragraph essay will no longer be the only genre you use for academic writing. Therefore, it is important to fully understand the process of developing and planning an undergraduate-level research paper. We will discuss this process in the next lesson.

I Don’t Want to Become a Researcher. Do Research and Academic Writing Still Matter?

Even though you may not be planning a career as a researcher, learning about academic research and writing academic papers teaches you important skills that will help you professionally. You will learn critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and you will learn to analyze research that may become the foundation for professional practices, policies, and innovation.

Attributions

“What is Academic Research, and Why Does it Matter?” by Nancy Bray, Introduction to Academic Writing, University of Alberta, is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0