Abstract
Although explicitly labelled research questions seem to be central to some fields, others do not need them. This may confuse authors, editors, readers and reviewers of multidisciplinary research. This article assesses the extent to which research questions are explicitly mentioned in 17 out of 22 areas of scholarship from 2000 to 2018 by searching over a million full-text open access journal articles. Research questions were almost never explicitly mentioned (under 2%) by articles in engineering, physical, life and medical sciences, and were the exception (always under 20%) for the broad fields in which they were least rare: computing, philosophy, theology and social sciences. Nevertheless, research questions were increasingly mentioned explicitly in all fields investigated, despite a rate of 1.8% overall (1.1% after correcting for irrelevant matches). Other terminology for an article’s purpose may be more widely used instead, including aims, objectives, goals, hypotheses, and purposes, although no terminology occurs in a majority of articles in any broad field tested. Authors, editors, readers and reviewers should therefore be aware that the use of explicitly labelled research questions or other explicit research purpose terminology is non-standard in most or all broad fields, although it is becoming less rare. Keywords: Research purpose statements; research article structures; research questions; research aims; research goals.Citation
Thelwall, M. and Mas-Bleda, A. (2020) How common are explicit research questions in journal articles? Quantitative Science Studies 1 (2): pp. 730–748 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00041Publisher
MIT PressJournal
Quantitative Science StudiesAdditional Links
https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/1/2/730/96146/How-common-are-explicit-research-questions-inType
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/1/2/730/96146/How-common-are-explicit-research-questions-inISSN
2641-3337ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1162/qss_a_00041
Scopus Count
Collections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Book of Abstracts: 2nd Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) Research Conference. Theme: Festival of Research (FoR) and Research during the COVID-19 PandemicSuresh, Subashini; Aggoun, Amar; Burnham, Keith (University of Wolverhampton, 2021-03-26)
-
What is the optimal number of researchers for social science research?Levitt, Jonathan M. (Springer, 2014-10-19)Many studies have found that co-authored research is more highly cited than single author research. This finding is policy relevant as it indicates that encouraging co-authored research will tend to maximise citation impact. Nevertheless, whilst the citation impact of research increase as the number of authors increases in the sciences, the extent to which this occurs in the social sciences is unknown. In response, this study investigates the average citation level of articles with one to four authors published in 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2007 in 19 social science disciplines. The results suggest that whilst having at least two authors gives a substantial citation impact advantage in all social science disciplines, additional authors are beneficial in some disciplines but not in others.
-
Does female-authored research have more educational impact than male-authored research?Thelwall, Mike (Levy Library Press, 2018-10-04)Female academics are more likely to be in teaching-related roles in some countries, including the USA. As a side effect of this, female-authored journal articles may tend to be more useful for students. This study assesses this hypothesis by investigating whether female first-authored research has more uptake in education than male first-authored research. Based on an analysis of Mendeley readers of articles from 2014 in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, the results show that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India. They also attract fewer professorial readers in Spain, the UK and the USA, but not India and Turkey, and tend to be less popular with senior academics. Because the results are based on analysis of differences within narrow fields they cannot be accounted for by females working in more education-related disciplines. The apparent additional educational impact for female-authored research could be due to selecting more accessible micro-specialisms, however, such as health-related instruments within the instrumentation narrow field. Whatever the cause, the results suggest that citation-based research evaluations may undervalue the wider impact of female researchers.