Dear Colleagues,
Another discussion list has recently been exploring the theme for
guidelines of academic research. One participant requested a basic
bibliography of sources. To answer this request, I prepared a note
that may be useful to subscribers on this list.
The post follows.
Happy New Year to all from
Ken Friedman
--
Until recently, the guidelines of academic research have been
transmitted by oral tradition and a form of apprentice system.
These have differed from field to field, discipline to discipline,
and they often differ even among close sub-disciplines or the same
disciplines in different universities and nations.
The enormous growth of universities in the 20th century and the
attending explosion of research programs and doctoral programs means
that the formerly intense and highly selective relationship between
doctoral mentors and their candidates has shifted.
As a result, many aspects of research formerly transmitted by oral
tradition and close relations between apprentice researchers and the
senior researchers who guide them have been lost. In many cases,
doctoral candidates graduate with significant gaps in the knowledge
and skills connected to research.
Much - often too much - depends on the luck of the draw in terms of
doctoral advisor.
Attempts to remedy these gaps take many shapes. Some seem to work
better than others. A program that is to rigidly structured is nearly
as problematic as a program that leaves too much to chance.
One supplementary remedy is both helpful and incomplete. This is the
growing body of literature outlining and explaining the craft,
guidelines and traditions of research.
The Craft of Research by Booth, Colomb and Williams is a superb
example of this kind of book. It is one volume in a series of books
on different aspects of the profession and practice of research. The
other titles include
Becker, Howard. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and
Finish Your Thesis, Book or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Walter W. Powell. 1985. Getting into Print: The Decision-Making
Process in Scholarly Publishing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mark Monmonier. 1993. Mapping It Out: Expository Cartography for the
Humanities and Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mulvaney, Nancy. 1994. Indexing Books. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The series include many more titles, all useful, well focused and well written.
There are also dozens of books these days on how to earn a research
degree. Most of these are rather pedestrian, some even uninformative.
Two stand out as especially useful and well structured. Both include
sections on the art and craft of research.
One of the oldest and best known is now in its third edition,
Phillips, Estell M. and Derek S. Pugh. 2000. How to get a PhD. A
handbook for students and their supervisors. Buckingham and
Philadelphia: The Open University Press.
The other leading title in the field is
Peters, Robert L. 1997. Getting What You Came For. The Smart
Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or Ph.D. New York: The Noonday
Press.
There is a third book that I wish I had acquired years ago. It
explains many aspects of developing an academic career along with
important details of the research career. It's written for the
sciences, but it offers ideas that every scholar can use:
Feibelman, Peter J. 1993. A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! A Guide to Survival
in Science. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Two excellent books address the craft of scholarly publishing:
Silverman, Franklin. 1999. Publishing for Tenure and Beyond.
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
Huff, Anne Sigismund. 1999. Writing for Scholarly Publication.
Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Sage also publishes a number of excellent titles in different aspects
of research and research writing:
Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a Literature Review. Releasing the Social
Science Imagination. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Kumar, Ranjit. 1999. Research Methodology. A step-by-step guide for
beginners. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Stake, Robert E. 1995. The Art of Case Study Research. Thousand Oaks,
California: Sage Publications.
Cummings, L. L. and Peter J. Frost, editors. 1995. Publishing in the
Organizational Sciences. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
There is also a growing body of literature on how to present findings
in seminars and at conferences. The best of these by far is by Robert
R. H. Anholt, a professor at Duke University Medical Center. Once
again, a book written for natural scientists has equally valuable
advice for the humanities and social sciences. The title is catchy -
perhaps too catchy - but the book is solid, concise and well crafted:
Anholt, Robert R.H. 1994. Dazle 'Em with Style. The Art of Oral
Scientific Presentation. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Then, there is a book like nothing else on the planet. This is a book
on research methods by Pirkko Anttila, one of Finland's most
interesting scholars. Antilla wrote this book to help scholars in the
emerging fields of the design sciences, including fields of the arts
and crafts where there has been no research tradition. She surveyed
research methods and approaches across a wide range of fields. She
summarized central themes and common issues. Then, she structured a
book that shows the researcher how and why to make specific
methodological choices, and then she gives rich bibliographic data
that helps the scholar locate deeper and more extensive information
for each choice.
This book is thorough and extensive in structure. It is so broad in
its applied value across fields that scholars from economics and
biology to history, anthropology and information science now use it.
Antilla and her students have also developed a CD-Rom that permits
the individual students to take a tutorial and work out questions and
issues in an interactive mode.
The one drawback of this book is that it is in Finnish. Even so, the
diagrammatic structures are so clear and the bibliographic
compilations so useful that scholars who don't speak a word of
English put it to good use.
With any luck, it will become available in English before long. In
the meantime, the adventurous school can order:
Antilla, Pirkko. 1996. Tutkimisen taito ja tiedon hankinta. Taito-,
yaide, ja muotoilualojen tutkimukesen tyvoevaelineet. Helsinki:
Akatiimi Oy.
If I were a graduate student or a beginning scholar on a limited
budget, the following short list would be my "magnificent seven."
They are all available in paperback. In alphabetical order, they are:
1) Anholt, Robert R.H. 1994. Dazle 'Em with Style. The Art of Oral
Scientific Presentation. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
2) Antilla, Pirkko. 1996. Tutkimisen taito ja tiedon hankinta.
Taito-, yaide, ja muotoilualojen tutkimukesen tyvoevaelineet.
Helsinki: Akatiimi Oy.
3) Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb A and Joseph M. Williams. 1995.
The Craft of Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
4) Feibelman, Peter J. 1993. A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! A Guide to
Survival in Science. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company.
5) Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a Literature Review. Releasing the Social
Science Imagination. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
6) Peters, Robert L. 1997. Getting What You Came For. The Smart
Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or Ph.D. New York: The Noonday
Press.
7) Phillips, Estell M. and Derek S. Pugh. 2000. How to get a PhD. A
handbook for students and their supervisors. Buckingham and
Philadelphia: The Open University Press.
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
School
+47 22.98.50.00 Telephone
+47 22.98.51.11 Telefax
Home office
+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone
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