So I’m researching an issue for a law school class. After spending a whole day in the library my results were fair. I still did not have a good enough handle on the issue as I wanted.
Almost ready to leave I casually look at some of the open books at a table near by. On the open page I find a citation to a relevant article on my subject. The article summarizes the issue perfectly. My research is pretty much done.
The thing is I feel bad I didn’t find the article on my own. I almost feel like I don’t deserve to use it. Of course I’m still going to use it, but I won’t feel good about it.
Does this happen to anyone else here? Or are you happy to take result in anyway that they come?
Well, perhaps it depends on whether the assignment was meant to get you to understand and analyze the issue, in which case it doesn’t matter so much how you got to the article. If the goal was to teach you how to research and find relevant articles, then you didn’t really learn what you were meant to learn. However, now that you have the article, do some reverse engineering and figure out what you could have done to find what you ultimately found by accident.
Good god, no. A fair part of my work as tech support is finding solutions for problems without relying on our company’s crappy “knowledge base” - the search function of whish is horribly horribly bad.
Even before this, I’ve made a living off finding the correct answer in unconventional ways. Or unconventional answers that work better than the conventional ones.
I use Wikipedia in research all the time for grant writing, though I usually try to identify their sources to determine if the subject is biased (usually they are). At times, however, no source is cited, and nothing else exists that I can find. When that happens…hey…Wikipedia is good enough if it supports the answer I am trying to get, so be it…
Much of my liberal arts “research” consists of “hey, I’ve read about this subject before in a book/journal I own,” going home and pulling the book/journal out of my library, then citing it. I do almost no traditional library research, poring over databases, or whatever else it is people are usually expected to do. (That said, when I do have to do outside research, I’ve got no problem using traditional resources.)
I do wonder sometimes if I’m “cheating” when I do research to get through classes that don’t require outside research. If I have problems understanding something in a math class, I can go online and find helpful papers, journals, PowerPoint presentations, lecture videos, sample tests and problem examples with answers, and message boards, all for free. I can get textbooks in PDF format and do text searches on them. If I’d gone for a math degree when I was the normal age to college, maybe 5% of this stuff would have been available, and it would have been more difficult to access. My teachers didn’t have these resources, they had (at best) some bound volumes of dog-eared math journals and textbooks with no easy way to search them. Then again, few peers bother trying to learn from other sources if they don’t understand the classroom lectures, so maybe I’m doing okay by bothering to do outside research to supplement my understanding.
I imagine a lot of long-time academics feel a little bit like they’re “cheating” when they use online databases, especially when they can search hundreds of journals simultaneously. It’s a huge change from just a decade or so ago; what could have been a month’s worth of painstaking work in a library can be done in a few seconds from the comfort of home. Similarly for engineers, mathematicians, physicists, etc., who can use a $10 calculator instead of lugging around books of logarithms, integrals, etc. Combined with things like having to manually type and edit papers, and not being able to easily access resources in other cities, it makes me thankful that I’m pursuing a degree now and not two decades ago.
I am perfectly happy to come by results by any method, as long as the methods are ethical themselves. That is, noticing something sitting out on a table in public is perfectly ethical, and therefore getting a result that way is also ethical.
It is potentially different, though, if you are doing this as part of your schooling. The purpose of schooling is not to get the research result, but rather to learn how to do it. So, you aren’t learning much about research methods if you find something somebody else turned up. I guess you have to judge the importance of this particular detail in the larger scope of the project you are working on.
In other words, a fellow student got there first and didn’t put the book back. You would have found the article if the book had been put back, wouldn’t you?
This is my thought. I’m assuming you know what resource you need, and you are trying to find it, and you would under normal circumstances. But remembering my own law school days, I recall that there were always a few resources that quickly became in demand when the class had some sort of assignment. Once word got out about these, finding them in the library was next to impossible–there were always holds on them, they were on reserve, or similar; but they were never on the shelf. Given the extremely competitive nature of law students, I think that if a needed but unlocatable resource was left out on a table, it would be regarded as “fair game.”