what is contribution to knowledge in research work

How to write a PhD in a hundred steps (or more)

A workingmumscholar's journey through her phd and beyond, contributions to knowledge and the ‘knowledge gap’.

If you have spent any time reading advice or ‘how to’ books on writing a thesis at any level, you will almost certainly have come across some version of this concept: the ‘knowledge gap’. And you will likely have been told that you have to create a research project or study that will find knowledge to fill a gap in your specific field or discipline’s knowledge base . This idea of filling a gap or hole in what your field knows or does freaks out many students, at all levels. The idea that you have to say something new when you are still learning your field and what it knows and does can be overwhelming.

But, after a conversation with colleagues who work with researcher development starting from senior undergraduate level all the way through Masters to PhD level, I have begun to wonder whether this concept of a knowledge ‘gap’ is actually not all that accurate or helpful as a starter about the purpose or goal of postgraduate research and knowledge creation, even at doctoral level. Maybe, we need to actively reframe the conversations we have with students doing research about how we can and do make different kinds of contributions to knowledge that grow and challenge knowledge in our fields.

what is contribution to knowledge in research work

The most common starting point for students beginning a research process is in the field itself, reading other studies, papers, research findings and so on. This enables them to see what research is being done, what the current trends are around theory and methodology, substantive findings that support or challenge their own research problem and so on. The literature review is almost always the first thing we ask students to focus on when they are developing a research proposal, especially at doctoral level where there is a firm requirement of a ‘novel’ contribution to knowledge. So, you kind of are looking for a gap, of sorts. But you’re not looking for it in terms of a total silence on your own research problem.

The first problem with the notion of a ‘gap’ or hole in the field that your study can fill, conceptually or empirically or methodologically, is that many students seeing this as meaning exactly that: silence, as in no one has ever done this research before. They feel they must claim that there are no existing studies like theirs for their study to be ‘novel’ and to fill the identified knowledge gap legitimately . In most fields, it is almost never the case that no one has ever done your kind of study before, or asked a similar kind of research question. And you really don’t want that either, because what you are really trying to do with your research is join a field that exists, and push it a tiny bit further; you’re not trying to strike out on your own.

This leads me to the second problem with talking about knowledge gaps and the need to fill them with original or novel claims to knowledge: in essence this can prevent many students from really seeing that they are writing about their research in relation to the field, to join an ongoing conversation , rather than writing about their research as an extended proof of claims that are completely new. We need to reframe teaching about the aim of research as being focused on joining an existing conversation as a new voice that has something of value to add to the field, rather than needing to say something radically new that has not yet ever been said. I think this may help student researchers in two main ways.

The first is with the way they read . Rather than reading every paper looking for a hole or a gap or silence and zeroing in on this, they may begin to read with a greater consciousness of how the field has already addressed similar questions, but perhaps from different angles, or with different theory, or with different methodology. They can then consider how this helps them to build and substantiate a space in which to position their own emerging claims to knowledge . Keeping a reading journal to keep track of these arguments, how they are made, and how they speak to one another or challenge one another (this bit is crucial) may then help students to begin to see the conversation emerging, and where they might be able to join in . Who is saying what, how, and why? Who is critiquing the dominant positions and why? How? Where does my work fit into all of this? What is this ongoing conversation all about?

Thinking and reading like this may then feed into a different, less defensive form of writing . Rather than trying to address every paper or article included in the literature review by showing what it doesn’t say to shore up a claim to the originality of their own research, student research writers may begin rather to craft literature reviews, and perhaps also theoretical and methodological frameworks in their thesis writing, from a different position: as one who is joining an existing field and conversation, unthreatened by all the work that is currently being or has been done. Rather, these sections will be written with the understanding that all the existing work is a resource for substantiating our own claims to knowledge, so that we can show how what we have to add builds on, e xtends, and may perhaps critique the current arguments dominating the conversation in the field.

Reframing the ‘knowledge gap’ as joining a conversation with a new voice and a small contribution to the field may also help researchers at other, lower, levels of study, such as Masters, Honours and senior undergraduate levels , where the knowledge gap can be particularly alarming. This is perhaps mainly because these students typically do less reading, and are not required to make a novel contribution to knowledge to attain their degree. Obviously, the more you read the field, the deeper and more nuanced your sense of the conversations in your field will be, as well as how they connect to and challenge one another. But students can join a conversation even at the lower levels, in a more modest form, if they are enabled to see this as what they are doing, rather than using their study to fill a gap that their reading load will not show them adequately.

Making a contribution to knowledge and filling knowledge gaps is spoken about a great deal in postgraduate and researcher education, but I wonder how often we stop and think about how students hear this, and what impact this has on their reading and writing behaviours and choices. I hope this post will help that process along, and help us find different ways to talk to students we work with about their own research purposes and goals.

What is knowledge and how do I contribute to it?

Research Skills , Voodoo
| October 9, 2017
By Katherine Firth

This is, perhaps, one of the biggest questions for many PhD candidates. Candidates know they need to make an ‘original contribution to knowledge’, but many of them are hazy about what that means, how to explain what they’ve done, and how significant their contribution is.

Before I go any further, I’m going to refer everyone to Mullins and Kiley’s absolute barnstormer of an article, ‘ It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize ‘. Their research on what experienced examiners are looking for in a PhD is excellent. Since this post is a metacognition post about how to think, I’m going to go through my whole thought process too.

What I’m going to say came up in a coaching session with a late stage candidate in my current day job at La Trobe, but it coalesced some things I’ve been telling people for years.

In the session, I drew this on the white board:

Lots of things got added as we talked and as I more fully explained what I was trying to say, and by the end, the board was a bit of a mess. So I made a quick version of it in PowerPoint (which is great for building flow charts).

It’s a heuristic, not a complete system–that is, this is a quick way to start thinking about a massive and messy problem, not something that is designed to address every single possible aspect of it . This means that your own research may not quite fit this model–but I strongly believe that it’s easy to modify a model than to start from scratch! (And if some of the terms sound like they have come out of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives , it’s because they did! It’s also unpacking what the the IMRAD structure is attempting to do for STEM theses in a way that is deeper and more widely useful.)

With all of this out of the way, let’s get on with the answer.

These are the different things that are knowable in PhD research, and what you are expected to do with them, and how they might be an original contribution to knowledge.

Knowledge: The bottom line is: ‘knowledge’ is everything academics know in your field . You can make an ‘original contribution to knowledge’ by helping nurses understand something that sociologists have known for 20 years (or vice versa ). Or you can bring something that practitioners have known for years into the academy. Perhaps you are bringing information only available to people who speak German or Vietnamese into English.

Interpretation, Analysis, Evaluation: For almost everyone, their interpretation of what they have found (your argument) will be unlike anyone else’s argument. Even if you are one of hundreds of people looking at penicillin or Romeo and Juliet , your reading will be subtly different from other people’s, you’ll put it all together in a slightly different way. In some cases, it is this section which is the most original: perhaps you are the first person to use a particular theoretical lens or research methodology on this information. You may also be the first researcher to take a data set or archived document, and analyse it for a thesis or publication. (When we talk about ‘discoveries’ in archives, this is usually what we mean.)

Information: Information is putting data into order. In your thesis, you are turning a mass of data into meaningful knowledge. Cataloguing, coding, reviewing or arranging facts is going to be a sizeable chunk of your research time and your thesis. It can also be a significant contribution to knowledge, if the information hasn’t been arranged before. Rearranging facts to tell a new story or enable new interpretations can also be a significant contribution.

Facts, Data, Experience, Imagination, Wisdom, Opinion: These are all things that are knowable–they can be discovered, recorded, found. There is value in all of them, though some of them have more value in some disciplines than others. (Imagination is integral to producing creative practice-led research; opinion is essential in marketing analysis; data is relevant to quantitative research). You may be the first researcher to count the number of Aedeomyia venustipes mosquitoes in this swamp in southern New South Wales, or part of a team that uncovers the archeological remains of a Victorian factory outside Bendigo. You might be the first researcher to ask this social group about their reasons for getting involved in marshal arts; or you may have written a novel as part of your doctorate.

Any of these ‘knowables’ can be your significant contribution to knowledge.

And all of these kinds of knowable will need to be in your research.

You will need to go and find your evidence, your facts or data or case studies or creative works.
You will need to set out your primary evidence, through quotes, tables, graphs or transcripts, or where you assemble the secondary evidence on your topic into a comprehensible order.
You will need to interpret, analyse and evaluate the evidence you have gathered and arranged. What does it mean? How reliable is it? Is it better than other evidence? What can we do with it?
And you will need to situate your work within what is already known in your field, and explain how much of it is new.

In some theses, these steps are clearly separated, your Methods, Results and Discussion are different chapters. In others, you will be moving from presenting the basic evidence, through to analysis and evaluation within a single sentence.

In most theses, for sections like the Introduction, Literature Review and Conclusion, you are doing all of these things at once. In a Lit Review, for example, you have arranged the things you have read into a comprehensible order, explained and evaluated how it fits with your particular research project, and used it to place your project within the context of your discipline.

I hope this helps you think about your original contribution to knowledge and to be clearer about what kinds of knowing you are using in your thesis at different moments. Articulating this can also help you to identify what’s going wrong if, for example, your supervisor gives you feedback that you ‘aren’t analytical enough’, or ‘the data section is a bit thin’.

If you’d like the slides for use in your own classroom/teaching, here there are linked: Knowables .

Let me know if you can think of kinds of knowledge I’ve left out, or if this helped you with your thesis (particularly if it doesn’t fit an IMRAD structure or quantitative methods).

A book launch (and the weird place of blogging right now)

This blog is currently more of a place for me to think out loud, than a place to connect to readers. That’s not a bad thing, but it means I need to be in the thinking phase of something! Instead, I’m exploring other ways to connect.

Out of sight: researchers and eyes

We maximise our powers of sight, by focussing—and focussing means some things are in focus and others are out of focus, out of sight; either blurry or in our peripheral vision or completely invisible.

And this makes me wonder, how can we use our sense of sight to help us by choosing NOT to look at certain things?

Pointless writing for pointless writing machines?: more thoughts on AI and human writing

The capacity of LLMs/AI has grown exponentially since I last wrote something, and is now turning up as an essential part of Google, Microsoft Office and other megalithic software programs. But I’m less interested in the how-to of this stuff, and much more interested in the why-for? And here’s another rambling on the internet (fully human generated) to help me track my thoughts as this new technology unfolds.