The research paper as argument

The research paper as an argument for a knowledge claim

A topic in research methodology

Academic research seeks to offer new knowledge. A research report can be see as comprising

• a knowledge claim (or several knowledge claims)
• the grounds for the claim(s)

The knowledge claim is the conclusion of the study.

e.g.,

• all normally-developing humans pass through the same invariant stages of cognitive development;
• 85% of children conceive of force and motion in terms of an 'imputus' model before formal science teaching;
• many school science textbooks present a misleading model of ionic bond formation;
• direction instructions is more effective than discovery learning

The sections of the research report preceding the conclusion can be considered as building up a multi-stage argument for why the knowledge claim is justified and should be accepted.

Is the scientific paper a fraud?

This was a question posed by the immunologist and Nobel laureate, Peter Medawer.

Peter Medawar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960 (shared with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet) "for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance" (a biography, and Medawaer's Nobel lecture can be found at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1960/medawar/biographical/).

Medawer was not suggesting that the authors of research reports were guilty of scientific malpractice by fabricating or misreporting their results. Medawer's point was that a causal reader might consider the research report as a narrative account of how research was carried out. However, the report would be highly selective, ignored many false starts, cul-de-sacs, strands of research which proved unproductive, hypotheses that could not be tested, and so forth.

Therefore a young person reading the research literature could get the impression that science involved a simple linear progression from hypothesis to experiment to results to conclusion – when that is seldom the case. So, the report misrepresented the processes of science, the practice of science, the subjective experience of doing science.

Yet, as Medawer pointed out, that was because it was not the function of research papers to do that. To borrow a distinction sometimes made, research reports are about the context of justification, not context of discovery.

The context of discovery

"In the Summer of 1955, I arranged to join some friends who were going into the Alps."

Thus begins Jim Watson's personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA (Watson, 1968)

'The double helix' is one of the best known books about the experience of doing science by a scientist, and can be considered ground breaking in providing a personal account. We find out what James Watson did when he was not working on his science. We find out about what he thought of other scientists, not just as scholars or researcher, about as people. We find out about the genesis of ideas, including ideas later abandoned, and about ideas to test them. We find out about scientists' 'style' (do they prefer carrying out systematic measurements, or speculative model building , or developing mathematical analysis, etc.), uneven scientific knowledge, and mistakes (such as not taking notes in a research seminar and misremembering the units an important measurement was being reported in).

Fleming discovered penicillin when he went on holiday and left the washing up of glassware till he got back , mauveine (aniline purple)- a dye – was discovered serendipitously when Perkin was trying to synthesis quinine – a medicine. Such examples make it clear that in research, investigating the unknown, the unexpected can happen. Indeed, the unexpected always happens, in the sense that if we knew for sure what to expect, we would not be doing research.

Whilst such material is of interest, and gives insight into the life of research scientists, it bears little relevance when evaluating knowledge claims. In claiming that penicillin has antibiotic properties what is relevant is evidence of its action on micro-organisms, not how it was discovered in the first place. The accidental discovery of mauveine has no bearing on a proposed synthetic route to quinine. That Crick and Watson's first public model of the structure of DNA was found to be both inconsistent with research data, and judged to represent an inherently unstable molecular structure, or that they considered themselves to be in a 'race' with Linus Pauling, has no bearing on the reasons proposed to support the merits of their second model (of a double helix).

The context of justification

The genre of the research paper is concerned with providing the grounds to support the knowledge claim made in the paper (i.e., with the context of justification). This can be considered to be a logical chain of argument. The chain could be represented:

If you agree with the authors’ conceptualisation of the current state of knowledge in the field

and

if you agree with that the research questions are suggested by that understanding

and

if you agree that the methodology chosen is appropriate for designing a study to answer the research questions

and

if you agree that the design of the research (the sampling of participants or data sources; the data collection instruments; the means of analysing the data etc.,) allows the research questions to be answered

and

if you believe that the design was implemented as planned

and

if you believe that the analysis is sound

and

if you believe the researchers have interpreted their findings appropriately

then

you have good reasons to accept their conclusions.

Anything that is not directly relevant to that line of argument is a distraction from the argument. Readers will tend to find the argument easier to follow if extraneous material is kept to a minimum. During peer review, journal referees will often recommend that anything not directly relevant to the argument of a research study should be excised before publication.

Sources cited:

• Medawar, P. B. (1963/1990). Is the scientific paper a fraud? In P. B. Medawar (Ed.), The Threat and the Glory (pp. 228-233). New York: Harper Collins, 1990. (Reprinted from: The Listener, Volume 70: 12th September, 1963).
• Watson, J. D. (1968/1980), The Double Helix: A personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA (Norton Critical Edition ed., Ed. G. S. Stent). New York: W W Norton and Company.