In a previous article, titled “How to Come up With a Research Question Easily Like a Pro” I briefly discussed the type of gap that allows you to replicate researches proudly without having to worry about their originality.
In this article, I’m going to discuss it in more detail and explain why it is very important to fill.
What is A Research Gap?
A research gap is generally any problem a scientific article, an academic book or a thesis may contain. In the previous article, based on Dr. Anthony Miles’ article on research gaps, I summarized the 7 research gaps into three main categories: theoretical problems, reasoning problems, and empirical problems.
What is the Empirical Gap?
In human and social sciences, doing research and arriving at a conclusion is a good effort, but it won’t have meaning until it gets tested and verified by other researchers, and that’s what a scientific community is made for: to test and verify each other and help each other progress.
To test and verify researches in different contexts, one should replicate them and see for themselves the results they obtain.
But… you may have already heard from your instructors that your research should be original and by reading these lines you’re maybe wondering whether replicating research is acceptable?
I assure you that indeed it is and that there are several reasons for it.
Why Should We Replicate Researches? – An Example
Doing so, What’s the difference? What’s new? — A new context, new data are explored.
What does it Mean for You as a Reader?
Newspapers like to report new researches on the spot to get people’s attention and attract more readers, but as a reader, you should resist the news and be careful about basing your opinions on them until you’ll be sure that the research has been verified and confirmed. Simon Oxenham, in a Big Think article about psychology studies, summarizes it this way:
“Whenever you hear the words “new study,” alarm bells should ring. It isn’t new studies that you should base your opinions on; it is old studies that have been replicated again and again, and the results reported in meta-analyses and systematic reviews.”
Summary
Filling it goes through falsification as Karl Popper observed during the demarcation of science and non-science.
All of this is normally more than enough to justify replicating researches for novices that view it as a wrong practice, but it’s totally the opposite.
This is all for the part I of The Reason to Replicate Research,
For Part II, Click Here.
References
NB: The references above have been built with a web application called ZoteroBib. For more information, please check the article I wrote about this, titled “How to Cite and Build a Bibliography in Under 10 Minutes!”.
KHETTAB Sid Ahmed is a doctoral student in French Linguistics at the University of Oran 2 Mohamed Ben Ahmed, Algeria. He is generally interested in Discourse Analysis and Applied Linguistics. His current research interests are centered around the Human Mind, Artificial Intelligence, and the relationship between Humans and Machines. As he is interested in DA, he manages a group on Facebook — under the name of Discourse Analysis — in which students, as well as researchers, meet and discuss theoretical frameworks for their researches. If you are interested, you are welcome to join us via the following link:
