Featured eBook of the Month: How to Do Research and How to Be a Researcher
How to Do Research: And How to Be a Researcher
Robert Stewart
Book Description from the Publisher
There are many textbooks on research methods, plenty of books on popular science, and specialist texts on a whole range of academic fields. However, few bring these together as a framework for a career involving research, and few attempt a practical appraisal of the challenges and opportunities involved in being ‘a researcher’.
Here, the principles underlying humanity’s past and continuing acquisition of knowledge are illustrated across a variety of academic fields, from history to quantum physics – telling stories of clever and inventive people with good ideas, but also of personalities, politics, and power.
This book draws together these strands to provide an informal and concise account of knowledge acquisition in all its guises. Having set out what research hopes to achieve, and why we are all researchers at heart, early chapters describe the basic principles underlying this – ways of thinking which may date back to the philosophers of the Athenian marketplace but are still powerful influences on the way research is carried out today.
Drawing on a broad range of disciplines, Stewart takes the reader well beyond the pure ‘scientific method’, which might work well enough in physics or chemistry but falls apart in life sciences, let alone humanities. Later chapters consider the realities of carrying out research and the ways in which these continue to shape its progress – researchers and their personalities, their employers, funding, publication, political forces, and power structures.
Robert Stewart is a Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Clinical Informatics at King’s College London. He has led, taught, and thought about research for more than 25 years at King’s College London and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre.
Check out the book through EBSCOhost eBook Collection, provided by the Briscoe Library.
Each month, we feature an ebook from our collections. Our goal is to feature titles of interest to students, faculty, staff, and alumni. If you have a title you would like to recommend, please let us know by emailing Kelley Minars at minars@uthscsa.edu.