Weary Thoughts Powered My Research
The foundation of a good research paper is an intriguing research question. It is this question that hooks readers, poses new ideas, and allows for an abundance of genuine support towards research. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been challenged by the concept of a research question. It has been a hurdle that is hard to overcome, battling boredom, academic standards, and struggling to determine what I’m really interested in.
It was during that pivotal brain-swirling crisis that I realized (with the help from Professor Isbell) that I could hone my question on just that–why is researching something important boring, why do articles follow the same foundation, and why is it hard to gain a passion and interest in issues that affect us as a society?
I can still focus on my community and a major entity that exists to repress it, but I can do it in a way that makes other researchers and advocates actually interested in what’s to be said. Even now I have plans to tie something I’m incredibly passionate about into my research (Survivor) by interviewing a former contestant who gained notoriety for being outed as trans on reality TV. I found that we don’t have to research something that has already been researched, but we can still take that research and convert it into information that unearths an underground idea.
I found that research doesn’t have to be boring. Sometimes, it’s the boredom that makes us realize the more unique and fun ideas to think about. Right now, my question is as follows: |Why does researching crucial topics become so boring, and how has clickbait and internet presence promoted that?| This question is still “under construction,” and I’m open to feedback regarding it as I narrow down the exact thing I’m questioning.
Boredom and its Unexpected Rewards
While scavenging for sources in an attempt to free me from the research that was keeping me captive, I started looking at my topic from a broader perspective. A perspective so broad that it aims to encapsulate the experience of researching as a whole. Funnily enough, I found a blog post published by scientist and decorated professor Daniel Lemire talking about his personal thoughts on why research has become so boring. I chose to work with Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring knowing that it was a “living” oxymoron–a scientific researcher researching about why research is boring? It was just what I needed to pull me out of the hole I found myself in.
Freedom, at last!
Taking it from the start, I felt stagnant. In a constant loop of being tired of articles and research, expressing these feelings, and then continuing to research the things that I found to be so boring. In my state of frustration, I looked up “WHY IS RESEARCH SO FUCKING BORING!!!!”, not knowing that I would stumble upon this blog post. It felt like a cliche in a film (you know when the main character, having nothing left, on a whim discovers the key to their story’s resolution), but it was real.
Lemire wrote with such grace and such emotion that I couldn’t help but be captivated by his writing. With every line I read from his blog post, rungs to the ladder that would help me out of this academic ditch were being built. I felt reassurance knowing that I wasn’t going crazy and that there was some hope that people aligned with my thought process!
But, most importantly, I felt free.
Features Prompting
It seems like the peer-review research papers establish this kind of customer-vendor relationship where you get a frank assessment. Unfortunately, it fails as you scale it up. The customers of the research paper are the independent readers, that is true, but they are the readers who have their own motivations.
-Daniel Lemire, Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
This quote here was the lightbulb moment for me. As much as we talk about clickbait, clicks, cookies, citations (and every other word that starts with a C), it still remained an untethered idea in my mind–until I read these three sentences which solidified the idea in place.
Works Cited
https://lemire.me/blog/author/lemire. (2021). Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring. Daniel Lemire’s Blog. https://lemire.me/blog/2021/01/01/peer-reviewed-papers-are-getting-increasingly-boring/
Image Credits
Blone guy hiding behind a colorful page, Signed model and property release on file with Shutterstock, Inc.
