Connecting to the Body of Knowledge

As a graduate student, the body of knowledge daunting and even overwhelming at times, and finding your place within the vast body of knowledge can be difficult. The process of finding your place within the ominous body of knowledge you first must begin with your own interests and ideas. From there the process continues with basic research on the topics that emerged from your areas of interest.
In the beginning stages of research, I know that I was overwhelmed because though I had several ideas on research topics that I found very interesting I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to focus on. Last semester I focused on the effects thin-image media has on young girls and this semester I am focusing on brand image, but I am still not one hundred percent locked into a topic. I still struggle with this because I am doing the project option and I find it hard to decide on a research topic without knowing for certain that it will be able to be disseminated to a broader audience or a specific client and be of benefit to them. I want to do an ad campaign and that is hard to finalize your plans when you don’t have a specific client in mind.
I think that really the best way to conduct research in a way that connects to the body of knowledge in journalism and mass communication studies is to research and read past studies until you find a topic or study that sparks your interest. A good way to make your research really connect to the larger body of knowledge is to look at the limitations and suggestions for future research that is presented in past studies. A couple of good places to find scholarly articles are Google Scholar and the OU library and Lexis Nexis. This is an easy and logical way to tie your research to the basis of a past study and build off of the already known findings. It is important to connect your research to other researchers work, because the work of others provides a good foundation to build your own studies. Also connecting your work to others research is a way of validating your work and showing to readers that you are knowledgeable on the topic.
The pros of connecting your research to the body of knowledge are vast. As I mentioned earlier, connecting your research with other researchers’ work give you a good foundation for your own study. It also helps to validate your study if you use previously published or validated work to build your own study.
The cons of connecting your research to the body of knowledge are few to none. The only major con, which isn’t really a con at all, only an annoyance, is that it takes a lot of time to conduct the research. Also if your study contradicts the previous findings on a topic, you may have a much harder time getting people to accept your study as valid. Really neither of these are cons, they are just a part of the process of conducting research and writing a thesis or project.

Conducting Research

Taylor Newcomb

Of course, before anything else is mentioned, quite possibly the greatest tool in conducting scholarly research is Google Scholar. This tool opens us up to hundreds, maybe even thousands, of relevant articles and books by the scholar we prefer. It is our shortcut to the body of knowledge, in that it helps us do it from home and at our leisure instead of dealing with the time and material constraints of libraries. For those of us who want to go beyond Google Scholar into the body of knowledge, there is Journal Storage which stores articles past five years ago. This site has been most helpful in tracking down books and articles by Bernays, whom is one of the foundations of my project. 

Once, there is that connection to the sites, the body of knowledge is just a click away. Knowing what has been done before is very important to research, because if we don't take the time to learn what others have said, then we are just wasting the time of others who will come after. The literature review, which is the manifestation of the body of knowledge, is key to showing others we have connected. It shows we have conducted the research by going through journals and articles to find that one article which explains it all. The body of knowledge is the foundation upon which the rest of our project/thesis rests, in the same manner as houses and buildings. 

The pros to conducting research into the body of knowledge could be wide ranging, but I will only stick to a few. The most important pro is that it might give us new avenues through which to peer. We may be pigeonholing ourselves to one item, but then one day, bam, we find an article that switches the light on for our project and lets us go a new, better way. This would have been impossible if we failed to conduct the research. Another pro is that we know the information. By researching the reading everything we can find, then we have a step up on people who fail to do it. A third, and for this section, final pro is that it gives us guidelines for conducting future research. We read what has been done and then from that figure out what needs to be researched next and how best it could be found. 

As for the cons, it is very time consuming. One can expect to lose hours conducting this research. We have outside lives, well most of us, that can't be pushed aside for the long time needed for research. Another con is that we may hit the end of our research trail. If we run out of items to find but still need more, then we may either have to change the point of our project or go insane. I faced this last semester when I ran out of items for sports crisis communication. There was just enough for that paper, but anything beyond that was impossible. A final, for this section, con is that the research may be leading us down the wrong path. We might not know it until too late, but we may have been following the wrong avenues and guidelines and ended up with a incomplete project and a defense deadline coming sooner than we want. 

Overall, the body of knowledge is something that is important to all. It gives us foundations and avenues with which to find our route. Without that research and body of knowledge, we would just be floating aimlessly in the ocean.