Do you prefer reading literature or doing research?

[bsharpe269]

I was thinking this morning about how I would much rather spend all day reading papers than actually doing my own research. I dont dislike my research at all. I actually find the theory behind it really interesting but since my work is computational, alot of times I spend an entire day trying to find bugs in my code or just run stuff on the cluster. I imagine that expermental work can be equally tedious, in its own way. I completely realize that these sorts of issues are just normal parts of research and I still perfer to do research over any other job out there.

 

I actually hear alot of people complain about having to read papers and these people seem to prefer doing the hands own work for their own research. I wonder if this could just be a difference in learning styles? For example, I learn best by sitting down with a book and staring at it until everything clicks. Others may be more hands on learners and prefer to do experiments rather than read about them.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? What do you prefer? Since professors assign most work out to grad students and spend days reading and thinking about research (and grants and teaching), I would like to think that I will love being a professor!

[wildviolet]

I think I learn different things from reading literature vs. "doing" research. First of all, they are two parts of the same research cycle--read to see what's been done before, do something new, go back to the literature to try to understand your findings, and so on. Sometimes reading too much literature makes me more confused because there are too many ideas floating around and not enough coherent connections between them. That is when I go to my empirical data and subjective "sense" of what's going on with my target phenomena. Doing the messy and hard work of trying to make sense of my data is where I learn a lot about what it is that I'm actually researching.

 

Theories and frameworks from the literature help me in that they are usually from established scholars who have thought about these issues a lot more than I have. On the other hand, empirical data offers a way to test those theories and frameworks and ground my research (as much as possible) in the social reality of teachers' everyday lives.

[Roll Right]

I'm curious, why do you bifurcate literature and research?

 

I think theory and practice, or literature and research, should be thought of as constituent parts of dialect. Without one, the other cannot exist. One propels the other, which acts back upon its propeller. This is the motion of science.

 

If you don't like the techniques that you employ in your research practice, why not look for new techniques, or more holositic methods? I am trained in quantitative sociology, but I find that the statistical method is rather alientating. You seem to be feeling the same thing in your computational research. Perhaps you could suppliment your computational work with some kind of qualitative, or historical-comparative methodology which fuses theory and practice in a more organic fashion.

 

I'm not sure if such a method exists in chemistry or biology. Its certainly not in fashion if it does exist....

[victorydance]

I like both. My favourite part of research is research design. I really like doing literature reviews, organizing sources, collecting data, and building my theory and hypothesis.

 

But I do like analyzing data and the composition phase as well.

[bsharpe269]

You guys make a good point that they really are both parts of the same thing. I guess one big difference I see is that doing research tends to be one or two big projects that can drag on a bit but when I read papers in my subfield, I feel like there is a lot more variation in topic.

 

Roll Right, you are probably right that the computational work might not be exactly what I want to do. I am definitely more interested in theory than the computational stuff but typically, the theory isnt worth as much if it can't be implemented into something useful. I think that it is pretty common in my field for professors and higher level grad students to focus on theory and improving models and people like me (entry grad students) do more implementation and analysis of data related to the models. This makes me think that I am on the right track to do what I love but I think I might have to endure some of the repetitive stuff to get there.

[juilletmercredi]

Hmm, this is a good question.  Yes, research and literature are both parts of the research process, but they are different parts.  It's not inconceivable that some people would prefer some parts of the research process than others.

 

I prefer to do the hands-on research to reading literature, but I think about it a bit more broadly.  I don't like running participants or doing recruitment (I'm in the social sciences and I need people for my studies), so it makes me gleeful to think about assigning those tasks to other people who enjoy them.  But I don't like endlessly thinking about the theoretical underpinnings of my research, either.  I mean, I think theory is VERY important and that every study should be theoretically backed; but my problem comes in when I'm collaborating with others and we spend enormous amounts of time discussing the theory and not very much talking about research methods.  I'm definitely a learn-by-doing kind of person - I can learn a lot by reading, but my favorite things to teach my students are things I learned by my own hands.  I'm the kind of person who learned to put together Ikea furniture by skipping the instructions and messing up until I grasped the concept, lol.  I've also defined myself as a bit of methodologist by my choice of topics in grad school and my postdoc, so there's that, lol.  (Interestingly, I do like talking about the theory of different research methods and statistical procedures.  LOL.)

 

What I really love is 1) planning - taking the idea from a theory/seed an actual study - so basically, designing the methods of the study; 2) data analysis - I love data analysis! and 3) writing up the results in a paper.  In that way, I think I'm pretty well-suited to being a professor.  I can outsource the stuff I don't like (which is the step in between #1 and #2 - actually collecting the data) and bring people on board to help me do the stuff I do like, but still having a lot of direction/control over the way that goes.

 

I used to hate reading literature/papers but now I kind of don't mind it.  It's not my favorite thing to do, but I've gotten better at scanning it and extracting the important points.  I think I just hate the really obscure, jargony way that scientists write.

[themmases]

This is very mood dependent for me. Even though I may be working, I take a long time to settle into full focus and enjoyment of the task at hand (I use task timers to force myself to start). Once I do that, I can enjoy most anything. Right now for work I'm doing literature reviews on some very bread and butter public health topics, like tobacco control. I spent all day today reading design guides for adding sidewalks and bike lanes to roads commissioned by various local governments. And I really liked it! As a student I used to not want to go to the library unless I could commit to spending at least 3-5 hours there. And I studied history in undergrad, so forcibly extracting meaning from jargon (anachronistic jargon!) was research, and enjoyable, to me for a long time.

 

In public health, the "doing" part could mean many different things including literature review or analysis. I know from experience that I find meeting with patients really rewarding but also really emotionally draining, and I will start to find excuses not to do it once I've seen a maximum of three in one day. I enjoy it in the moment-- even the really tough meetings where I am thinking on my feet about how to gain or establish trust-- and feel sort of high after an informed consent. But I wouldn't say I look forward to it or would willingly do research where I had to go through that all day. Waiting for a patient meeting to start feels sort of like waiting for them to pierce the second ear, to me: kind of excited, kind of dreading it, maybe it's not too late to cancel...