Sharing Trusted Knowledge Is Essential to a Robust Research Environment

Valuing Research Part III: The entire research ethos is designed to ensure objectivity and encourage knowledge expansion

Jun 03, 2025

Welcome to the gazebo! Take a seat. I’m honored you’re here!1

This Week’s Summary:

Academic research articles are boring … by design!
Credible research strips out opinion and presents verified facts.
Citations are at the heart of all credible research.
Tomorrow’s researchers will use today’s research to support their claims.
We all lose when marketing hype masquerades as credible research.

If you have ever read, or tried to read, a complete academic article you probably walked away feeling like you needed an energy drink to get past the first page. They are usually dry reading, without a lot of fluff, and with little personality. Boring, actually. It may amaze you, but this is by design.

Image Copyright © 2025 by Ed Paulson. All rights reserved.

A key intent of research is to separate fact from innuendo and opinion. The research process is designed to uncover facts related to a given situation, both in favor of and in opposition to a point of view. By considering all sides of a situation, decision makers are in a more informed position to determine the implications of whatever decisions they make. Facts, like gravity, just are. People may not like the facts, but the facts don’t care. Like gravity, they don’t change based on who looks at them, and solid research that has been peer reviewed should withstand that scrutiny.

The whole point of an academic article is for the findings of the article to stand on their own merits such that another researcher can read the article, understand its main findings, and determine if they trust the method used for the study. Academic articles are not persuasive works. The opportunity or benefit derived from the research is in the mind of the reader, as we talked about last time in reference to Marconi and his development of the radio.

One point most don’t consider is that the article should also contain enough detail to enable another researcher to recreate the study to confirm the reported findings. If the results were not a fluke related to flawed research design then others should be able to replicate the study and get similar findings under similar circumstances. Again, gravity doesn’t care who tests it. It is gravity. Period.

THE STRUCTURE OF A TYPICAL RESEARCH PAPER

Before we get into the ways in which today’s researchers use prior work, let’s look at the structure of a typical research paper. A common section flow is as follows:

Abstract – Summarizes the research and its significance, typically in less than 300 words.
Keywords – These are selected to make the key findings of this article easier to find when the next researcher does an online search.
Introduction – Explains in more detail than the abstract the reason for doing the research and details why this particular study is different from what has been done previously.
Literature Review – This is where the researchers build an academic argument using the existing body of knowledge (BOK) to explain why this particular research question is valuable and why this particular new approach to researching the topic was warranted.

IMPORTANT: NO OPINIONS ALLOWED HERE. The argument must be built on the work of others, not an unsupported opinion. These are difficult to write, and many folks never learn how to write a credible Literature Review.
Methodology – This is a detailed explanation of the data collection and analysis approach used in the study (if applicable). The level of details should be such that other researchers could replicate the study should they desire.
Results – This is an explanation of the findings of the study and how the data was analyzed to arrive at those findings.
Discussion – In this section the author(s) discuss the details of their study’s findings and offer their own analysis of what it all means. This is sort of like their analysis of their own research findings.
Conclusion – A summary of the entire study, sort of like the Abstract, except after the fact such that more explanation can be offered as to how and why the conclusions were reached. There might also be recommendations for future research.
References/Appendices – A detailed listing of the various references that were used to develop the research approach, support the literature review, analyze the collected data, and draw the stated conclusions. The formatting here is extremely strict so that any researcher can find any of these sources and make their own determinations about their meaning and applicability to their own study. (As a reader, I sometimes spend a lot of time here just looking at the references to find other approaches to investigating a topic I am researching.)

Let me emphasize this important point again: The entire structure of academic research writing is to strip out as much personal opinion as possible so that readers are free to determine, for themselves, the applicability of the stated research to their particular research question.

The dry, objective approach of a credible research study is a radical departure from the opinion onslaught we see every day in the media where personal bias and opinion are shouted as though they are fact. In reality, even a slight look at the “facts” underlying flawed study claims will often show that they do not exist, were presented incorrectly or out of context, or are basically just another opinion shared as fact. If I reference another opinion, that does not make it a fact. It just makes it well known.

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Gravity doesn’t care if it is popular.

Critical to any credible research study is the unbreakable rule that the justification for a study must build on the work of others and does not become valid because you believe it is true. If you cannot support it through existing body of knowledge combined with a solid methodology, it is conjecture and should be presented as such.

This is the reason for the Literature Review and cited References list at the end. All works cited in the text of the paper must be included in the References section so that readers can review those studies and decide for themselves how applicable the cited work is to their current research study.

Without prior research work there will be no body of knowledge from which to draw for any current research studies. This is a critical point in today’s world where the current administration is slashing federally funded research budgets across the board.

HEY! WHAT’S THAT PAIN ON YOUR LEFT SIDE

All of these constraints may seem like a lot of work, but it is all for good reason. Think about it this way. Assume that you have been feeling a pain in your left side and wondering what is happening, so you go to see your doctor. After running a few tests, the doctor gives you a diagnosis of cancer. How does your doctor know this?

Because someone had done studies earlier to determine if the results of the tests that were just run could reliably be used to determine the presence of cancer, which in this case they did.

Without those prior research studies your doctor would not have had the necessary information to make an accurate diagnosis, and you might have walked around for a long time after your visit with a growing cancer that could have been treated earlier if your doctor had the prior study results. The prior research arguably saved your life in this example.

Image Copyright © by Ed Paulson. All Rights Reserved.

We often hear about bizarre research topics and may think, “What a waste of money?” Here is the thing to consider: We never know when or how that seemingly bizarre study’s findings might fit into the thinking of a future researcher who might connect the dots in a unique way based on their unique background and research area of interest.

LOOKING AT QUANTUM COMPUTING AS AN EXAMPLE

Quantum computing is a new area of research and commercial interest that offers an interesting example of how all of this research structure fits together. I won’t go into the complexities of quantum computing in this article, and I plan to in a later one, so stay tuned. If you have heard anything about quantum computing it is likely that it is far faster than conventional computing and that it has the ability to make today’s data processing speeds look like they are standing still. Hyperbole? maybe. But from what I am learning, the potential of this groundbreaking technology truly is astounding, and it didn’t start out as it is today.

Quantum computing has been in research and development for over 40 years. And now, states like Illinois are committing major resources to become the next Quantum version of Silicon Valley expecting the major economic and social benefits that will come to any region that dominates this fascinating field.

What started out as an idea published in a research journal in 1982 is now on the verge of creating a computational revolution.

Check out this chart from a 2024 research paper by James C L Chow 2that appeared in Med Sci (Basel) 3and was accessed through the National Library of Medicine. The paper discusses the evolution of quantum computing in medicine. The chart shows that the first ideas for quantum computing were presented in 1982 by Richard Feynman in his own research paper 4that was published in the International Journal of Theoretical Physics.

You could probably spend a year working through all of the 88 references that are offered at the end of the Chow paper, and that is the whole point! Each of these referenced articles was used by Chow to build the case (what academics call an “argument”) for the conclusions of his own paper. As a researcher reading Chow’s paper, here are your options. You could simply accept Chow’s interpretation of things and use his work to shape your own thinking, or you could decide to scan this list of references, select the ones that look like they might be useful for your interests, and then review them yourself. In this way, you can make your own determination about the validity of Chow’s claims and from that assessment determine if you trust Chow’s work enough to use it in your own work. Yep. All of this thought process is an integral part of credible research. It is a lot, and it is expected by any credible researcher, research institution, or research journal.

Which is why the recent discovery that a White House labelled “gold standard” research paper on chronic disease in children published by the Health and Human Services (HHS) department with major citation errors 5 is so troubling. A clear example of hyperbole being sold as “research.”

The errors included references to papers where the cited authors had not conducted the study and did not write the report being cited! These problems go WAY beyond a few typos and spelling errors as the White House press secretary would have us believe. Let’s just say that if one of my undergraduate students submitted a report with these types of errors, they would be lucky to get a “D.”

Remember, research paper authors must build their conclusions based on the prior research work of others, and when that referenced work is then found to not exist at all, it raises serious credibility questions about the entire report.

I will write more about this on my Grifter Chronicles site, and I hope you stop by there to get a more thorough look at the dangerous game being played by the White House in publishing this seriously flawed report as its basis for upcoming policy changes that can negatively affect all of us, including our children.

SUMMARY

We covered a lot of ground in this issue so I thought a quick summary would help drive home the key points.

Researchers design their work robustly expecting to be peer reviewed before publication.
An objective justification must be made to the proposed research based on the knowledge and work of other researchers, not innuendo and personal opinion.
Keywords are necessary to facilitate easy discovery by future researchers.
The abstract encapsulates the key points of the study.
The summary and conclusions offer details about how the data was collected and analyzed, along with key findings and study limitations.
Many researchers will include recommendations for future follow-on research.
This is all by design to ensure that the facts of the study stand on their own merits, and so that future researchers can easily find the study and trust its findings for inclusion in their work.

One never knows where their research work will show up as inspiration for another researcher. The commitment to ensuring that one’s own research is as solid as possible is at the heart of each credible researcher study. Flawed research helps nobody, and excellent research can be used as the launching pad for the next researcher’s great ideas.

That is the essence of curiosity and creativity, which ties in nicely with neuroplasticity and how our brains learn, which are our topics for next time. Thank you as always for stopping by.

Peace.

What do you think are some of the most amazing research breakthroughs that have happened in your lifetime? Share it below with a comment so we can all learn from you.

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