The Research Process & Scholarly Communication
The research lifecycle refers to the process of conducting research, from the The research lifecycle refers to the process of conducting research, from the initial planning and designing of a project to publishing and disseminating the conclusions or scholarship. While your project will have an end, the data you use in your project lives on. The process of deciding and documenting how data will be collected, organized, stored, and shared is called data management The ways a researcher collects, organizes, stores, and accesses data they collect for research. Creating a data management plan allows a researcher to know what data they will be collecting and how they will store and organize it during the research project..
The steps of the research lifecycle and the work done during these steps are usually:
- Planning: when you design your research project, your plan for how you will manage your project’s data, and conduct your literature review The process of summarizing, synthesizing and/or critiquing literature around a specific topic/idea. This work can help a researcher understand what has happened before and also how past research intersects and or diverges from other research. A literature review can be a full-length manuscript or a subsection within a larger research article.
- Collecting: when your research, discovery, and data collection takes place
- Analyzing: when you look at your data and write up your findings The section of a research article where researchers share the results from the research. This section takes the results and directly connects them to the research questions or hypotheses posed at the start of the article. Also can be called “Findings.” and recommendations stemming from your research
- Disseminating: when you present, publish, and share your findings
- Preserving: when you decide where your findings and data will be hosted to ensure discoverability and utility for other researchers
Scholarly communication is essentially the ecosystem that sustains the research lifecycle and is how the knowledge gained from research is shared and discussed among scholars. This can involve publishing or through more informal networks, like listservs and social media.
When you engage in scholarly publishing, you play your own role in a larger system of sharing knowledge. As a researcher and author, you write and publish your findings in an output like an academic journal. Editors of academic journals receive your submission and oversee the peer review process. Peer reviewers perform a close reading of your work in order to make a recommendation for your work to be accepted for publication. If your work is accepted, it undergoes additional review and editing before being published. Institutions like academic libraries then provide access to your published work, where it is then discovered and used to inform practice in the profession or in future research. Hopefully, this gives you a better understanding of how your research is created and shared as well as the larger role you hold as a scholar in the field!
Now, scholarly publishing is meant to share new knowledge so that it might lead to discovery, innovation, and improvements in society. And while that is a very worthy cause, many people also may pursue research because their jobs depend on it. Perhaps research is needed before a new service is adopted at your library, or you have observed a phenomenon at your institution that you’d like to explore further, or maybe you are in a position that requires research for tenure.
It is important to take stock of who owns and operates the scholarly journals that control the profits from publishing research in our fields. As Amanda Makula (2022) elaborates in the book Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing:
In the current scholarly publishing system, scholarly articles — whose authors, editors, and peer reviewers are most often faculty, academics, and researchers — eventually become goods owned not by the people who created them, but by a commercial entity who profits from them and their use. The people who are doing the labor — conducting research, writing articles, editing articles, and performing peer review — are not the ones who reap its rewards, at least not financially. Instead, corporate publishing businesses essentially commodify the work and wield control over how it will henceforth be handled, including its curation, discovery, dissemination, usage, and preservation. (In the chapter “Some Problems.”)
Because some LIS An interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. researchers must adhere to traditional academic culture and tenure systems in order to keep their jobs and justify promotion and tenure, it’s hard to divest from publishing in certain journals because of their impact and prestige. But there is a strong number of scholars who encourage and promote publishing in Open Access journals, which provide publishers the financial means to offer access to researchers instead of charging the reader for access through purchase or subscription. In addition to these structural imbalances, the racial makeup of academia and the LIS field contributes to whose research is being published. According to a recent Ithaka S+R report, librarianship is currently estimated to be about 86-88% white. This lack of racial diversity results The section of a research article where researchers share the results from the research. This section takes the results and directly connects them to the research questions or hypotheses posed at the start of the article. Also can be called “Findings.” in a dearth of BIPOC perspectives and thus a body of work that is narrower and more limited than a more inclusive system would foster.
All of this context can help when you are considering how and where to share your own research findings. Power, Profit, and Privilege provides some great thought exercises for making these decisions.
Each stage of the research process and how you choose to disseminate your findings all have their own time constraints. In the next lesson, we’ll help you plan for this.
Topic 2 References
Association of College & Research Libraries. Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication 1. 2003. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/principlesstrategies/
Kendrick, Curtis. “Changing the Racial Demographics of Librarians.” Ithaka S+R. Last modified 18 April 2023. doi.org/10.18665/sr.318717.
Makula, Amanda. Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 2022.https://pressbooks.pub/pppscholarlypublishing/
“The Research Lifecycle.” University of Colorado Boulder Center of Research Data & Digital Scholarship. https://www.colorado.edu/crdds/what-we-do/research-lifecycle
“The Scholarly Communication Toolkit.” Association of College & Research Libraries. 2020. https://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/home
The Research Process & Scholarly Communication
The research lifecycle refers to the process of conducting research, from the The research lifecycle refers to the process of conducting research, from the initial planning and designing of a project to publishing and disseminating the conclusions or scholarship. While your project will have an end, the data you use in your project lives on. The process of deciding and documenting how data will be collected, organized, stored, and shared is called data managementData management The ways a researcher collects, organizes, stores, and accesses data they collect for research. Creating a data management plan allows a researcher to know what data they will be collecting and how they will store and organize it during the research project..
The steps of the research lifecycle and the work done during these steps are usually:
Scholarly communication is essentially the ecosystem that sustains the research lifecycle and is how the knowledge gained from research is shared and discussed among scholars. This can involve publishing or through more informal networks, like listservs and social media.
When you engage in scholarly publishing, you play your own role in a larger system of sharing knowledge. As a researcher and author, you write and publish your findings in an output like an academic journal. Editors of academic journals receive your submission and oversee the peer review process. Peer reviewers perform a close reading of your work in order to make a recommendation for your work to be accepted for publication. If your work is accepted, it undergoes additional review and editing before being published. Institutions like academic libraries then provide access to your published work, where it is then discovered and used to inform practice in the profession or in future research. Hopefully, this gives you a better understanding of how your research is created and shared as well as the larger role you hold as a scholar in the field!
Now, scholarly publishing is meant to share new knowledge so that it might lead to discovery, innovation, and improvements in society. And while that is a very worthy cause, many people also may pursue research because their jobs depend on it. Perhaps research is needed before a new service is adopted at your library, or you have observed a phenomenon at your institution that you’d like to explore further, or maybe you are in a position that requires research for tenure.
It is important to take stock of who owns and operates the scholarly journals that control the profits from publishing research in our fields. As Amanda Makula (2022) elaborates in the book Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing:
In the current scholarly publishing system, scholarly articles — whose authors, editors, and peer reviewers are most often faculty, academics, and researchers — eventually become goods owned not by the people who created them, but by a commercial entity who profits from them and their use. The people who are doing the labor — conducting research, writing articles, editing articles, and performing peer review — are not the ones who reap its rewards, at least not financially. Instead, corporate publishing businesses essentially commodify the work and wield control over how it will henceforth be handled, including its curation, discovery, dissemination, usage, and preservation. (In the chapter “Some Problems.”)
Because some LISLibrary and Information Science An interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. researchers must adhere to traditional academic culture and tenure systems in order to keep their jobs and justify promotion and tenure, it’s hard to divest from publishing in certain journals because of their impact and prestige. But there is a strong number of scholars who encourage and promote publishing in Open Access journals, which provide publishers the financial means to offer access to researchers instead of charging the reader for access through purchase or subscription. In addition to these structural imbalances, the racial makeup of academia and the LIS field contributes to whose research is being published. According to a recent Ithaka S+R report, librarianship is currently estimated to be about 86-88% white. This lack of racial diversity resultsResults The section of a research article where researchers share the results from the research. This section takes the results and directly connects them to the research questions or hypotheses posed at the start of the article. Also can be called “Findings.” in a dearth of BIPOC perspectives and thus a body of work that is narrower and more limited than a more inclusive system would foster.
All of this context can help when you are considering how and where to share your own research findings. Power, Profit, and Privilege provides some great thought exercises for making these decisions.
Each stage of the research process and how you choose to disseminate your findings all have their own time constraints. In the next lesson, we’ll help you plan for this.
Topic 2 References
Association of College & Research Libraries. Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication 1. 2003. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/principlesstrategies/
Kendrick, Curtis. “Changing the Racial Demographics of Librarians.” Ithaka S+R. Last modified 18 April 2023. doi.org/10.18665/sr.318717.
Makula, Amanda. Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 2022.https://pressbooks.pub/pppscholarlypublishing/
“The Research Lifecycle.” University of Colorado Boulder Center of Research Data & Digital Scholarship. https://www.colorado.edu/crdds/what-we-do/research-lifecycle
“The Scholarly Communication Toolkit.” Association of College & Research Libraries. 2020. https://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/home