INTRODUCTION
In many respects the genesis of this series is the result of a personal mission. In research practice and publications I have held an ongoing concern, even frustration, about duplications of effort and the âreinvention of wheelsâ. Unnecessary repetitions of scholarly work, failure to recognise or even be aware of prior, foundational outputs, pre-existing knowledge or important breakthroughs undermine research progress (Iphofen, 2016a).
One could reasonably ask if anyone really suffers from such failures. Clearly the individual academic who conducted the original work ultimately suffers in not being seen to make a contribution to the advancement of knowledge. But that may not be noticed except by the few who have access to the relevant sources. Indeed a researcher who appeared to take little notice of the original work may also be seen not to have made a valid contribution if the prior work subsequently comes to light. That researcherâs contribution is doubly diminished by the priority of the previous work and by its having been ignored or neglected. The body of scientific knowledge also suffers in that progress is necessarily slowed by unnecessary duplication. And society suffers in having to pay the costs of delayed progress and superfluous repetitions. Such costs might include repeat funding for activities covering similar fields of study or, worse, the delay in applying research findings that can improve human lives. Note that I am not here criticising the rigorous replication of previous research findings in order to test their continuing validity. But such replication would need to be fully justified in terms of its âvalueâ to making progress in science or in awareness of changing social or physical contexts.
So why might previous work go unnoticed or ignored? In the past there were reasonable excuses. Prior to the creation of reliable online search facilities, the âmachineryâ for searching was manual, text-based, inefficient and could not be comprehensive. Many older researchers can recall working in places like the old British Library reading room, leafing through reams of card indexes in oak drawers to guess from a book title whether it related to their concerns. At other times the easiest solution was to patrol the relevant sections in the library for the small number of journals in your chosen specialist area and âspine readâ the shelves for relevant books. Good reference librarians were essential. Although these tasks were laborious there was still the delight associated with the unexpected find â a book on a topic that surprised or, more often, sent one off course! Or as bibliographic work progressed in the 1970s there were the indexed abstracts, citation indexes, the British Humanities Index, or Keesingâs Archives summarising news stories and so on that proposed timesaving opportunities. By the 1990s it had become possible to consider a field most thoroughly researched if one covered all such material and then followed up all the references in the published works. Nevertheless one still had to first wade through the paper by hand and it was extremely time-consuming and considerably less fun than spine-searching.
These searches were based on skills, professionalism, some intuition and the occasional lucky break. Students were reliant upon the advice of supervisors and academics on colleagues to ensure that nothing was neglected. âHave you thought of ⌠so and soâs work?â Partly as a consequence of scholarly preferences and the imperfections and selective nature of human memory, that source could not be regarded as thoroughly exhaustive. It also privileged concentrations of scholars and their close networks. There were additional particular problems accessing grey literature â government, NGO and corporate publications that did not always make it into academic research world.
There are many other reasons why previous and even contemporary research developments might be overlooked. The exponential growth in both print and, later, online publications meant that it has become increasingly challenging to conduct reliably comprehensive literature reviews. Each academic, not only under the pressure of formal research assessment practices, but in order to advance their own career might choose to ânot pay attention toâ the work of others that might undermine their own claim to originality. Although contested, Kuhn (1962) offered some insight into these institutional pressures when he wrote of the constraints of âparadigmatic closureâ and the resistance to new ideas in science. To be sympathetic, there can be nothing worse than developing an idea, researching a field as thoroughly as one could only to come across, at âtoo lateâ a stage, a piece of work that produced the same or similar findings only a few years earlier. Nothing is more dispiriting than just before journal submission or even a PhD viva discovering prior work that argues a similar point. Does one go for a re-write and admit a diminution of originality? Or submit and pray the chosen esteemed referees have equally âmissedâ the previous work?
To repeat: what we must seek to avoid are the frustrations that go with working at length on a topic only to discover that someone has already produced the definitive response to the problem. And the related frustration is to come across work conducted today that takes no account of well-publicised research delivered some years previously. In addition we must guard against the temptation to corrupt practices that many see as undermining scientific integrity. These include plagiarism, failures to acknowledge prior work, biased peer reviewing and, in effect, poorly conducted desk or secondary research. Of course there is nothing new about such discreditable activities. For example, Sutton (2014) offers evidence that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace clearly plagiarised the earlier ideas of Patrick Matthew without acknowledgement and Darwin then used his elite connections to ensure that he would not be scooped by Wallace. And although no culpability could be attributed to Einstein, Arthur Eddingtonâs famous experiment that confirmed Einsteinâs theory of relativity was manipulated in favour of Einstein when Eddington threw out 16 photographic plates (two-thirds of his data) that seemed to support Newtonâs view over Einsteinâs (see Waller, 2002, on both Darwin and Eddington).
So when entering a new field of endeavour, how do we find out all that has previously been achieved? That is, how do we build upon already existing developments, avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, and the continual âreinvention of the wheelâ? How do we maintain standards in research and ensure that much promoted principle of âintegrityâ? The constructive way to make progress is to assess existing previous work and see what else can be done that is novel, but without losing sight of the valuable insights that have gone before. In fact, isnât that something all novice students conducting research are told by their supervisors? Do the secondary, desk research first. Do the literature review. Make sure you know what is available before starting to devise your own programme. Indeed many scientists proclaim progress as being made when âstanding on the shoulders of giantsâ â ironically given the points raised above, often Darwin and Einstein are held up as the more obvious examples. And such eminent figures are rarely forgotten in the history of scientific success however âflawedâ some of their work might be considered to be in retrospect (Waller, 2004). But most scientists are âjobbingâ researchers keen to progress âthe fieldâ while ensuring their own job security. So when making a contribution to the field, how can these âordinaryâ researchers ensure that future contributors are aware of what has already been achieved so that they, too, can build upon existing knowledge? There has to be something of an obligation on all researchers to seek the best, most effective means to disseminat...
