Research Definition

What is Research?

Research doesn’t just happen in the classroom.  Research is a creative, dynamic process that draws from past knowledge to develop a new understanding.  While almost every undergraduate student has written a research paper at one point in his or her academic career, it can be difficult to define precisely what research is.  Research can be personal or professional, and it can involve a highly structured methodology or a spontaneous set of discoveries.  Research can even happen when you aren’t expecting it: looking through a family photo album, reading a memoir by a famous politician, or watching a documentary can be a form of research, too.

Research is not just about the process, but also about the product.  Scholarly inquiry inevitably leads to a discovery of some sort: a new theory, a new point of view on an issue, or a real-world solution to a problem.  GMR strives to publish work that makes us think about a topic or subject in a new way; research that reaches across disciplines in its methodology, form, or content and employs creativity both in the research process and in the research product.

What is Re-visioning Scholarship?

Academic and Creative

The questions below show the difficulty in distinguishing between the criteria of academic versus creative, and this difficulty stems in part from the vagueness that these terms necessarily adopt when introduced to the cross-disciplinary context of the GMR.

How does the biology major demonstrate the creativity of his or her work to non-biology majors?

How can the English major demonstrate to his or her peers the academic process involved in a narrative essay?

What categorizes mathematics as academic and poetry as creative—and what keeps us from labeling mathematics creative or poetry academic?

Yet in just such a vague, ill-defined area you have a tremendous opportunity to define scholarship and do so in a way that includes your own eclectic range of experiences, academic or otherwise.  and your works contribute to this debate as a representation of what scholarship looks like.

Distinction

These works highlight the framework of their field by effectively incorporating improbable structures from other fields.

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