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Information Produced by Academic
Institutions
Research universities and colleges are the other major producers of knowledge in our country. Large universities such as the University of Wisconsin, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the University of Minnesota employ faculty whose job it is to perform research and publish the results. University faculty perform research in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. The results of this research can sometimes be applied directly to practical and social problems. Research in the sciences and social sciences often directly benefit companies and other public institutions. However, much of the research and knowledge produced by scholars does not directly affect the public at large. Rather, the research and knowledge produced by scholars is used by other scholars to advance a specific field of study. The knowledge produced by scholars may not directly affect society for many years. Much of the research and knowledge production in higher education is done by faculty at publicly funded universities. However, there are numerous private research universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford which produce a great deal of knowledge. The research and knowledge generated by faculty at universities is most often published in the form of books and scholarly journals. You can locate this knowledge by searching library catalogs and scholarly journal indexes. Faculty research is often driven by the interests of the individual faculty member or by the field of study to which the faculty member belongs. Many ideas are never pursued by faculty researchers either because they are not interested in a topic, they would never be able to get the research published, or because pursuing the research would be detrimental to their careers. Because knowledge production at universities and colleges takes place within academic disciplines you need to understand how the academic disciplines are structured and how they operate within the university. Not all academic disciplines produce knowledge in the same way and the disciplines are not equal in their funding or importance within the university. Disciplines which can directly apply their knowledge to practical applications, such as medicine, law, computer science, and engineering tend to be better funded and often attract funding from the private sector. Disciplines like philosophy, history, creative writing, and women's studies do not usually produce knowledge that can be directly applied to practical situations. These disciplines tend to be less well funded at contemporary universities. Brian Martin does an excellent job analyzing the research process in "The Politics of Research", a chapter in his book Information Liberation. There is quite a bit of disagreement about what constitutes a discipline. In fact, there is ongoing tension and conflict in universities over boundaries between disciplines. Usually it is those who deal with theory--pure mathematicians, theoretical physicists, econometricians--who lay claim to the core of the discipline. Others are simply 'applying' the knowledge.... Power for disciplines comes from control over ideas, hence the status and influence of theory. Most money comes directly or indirectly from the potential for applications, but this makes researchers more dependent on outside groups. This creates the curious situation in universities in which theoreticians have the greatest status but applied work reaps the greatest material rewards. The areas that are most commonly left out in the cold are interdisciplinary fields for which there is little funding. By the logic of disciplines, these fields are simply ignored. Only when there is a popular movement do universities sometimes find that there is an area of study worthy of attention. For example, the rise of the environmental movement in the late 1960s led many universities to set up environmental studies programs. But because these programs didn't fit neatly into disciplinary boxes, they were vulnerable to cutbacks and amalgamations as the years wore on. (Brian Martin, "The Politics of Research", Information Liberation. London: Freedom Press, 1998, pp.129-30.)You must also realize that some disciplines are considered more important than others, and certain people within a specific discipline hold more power and are considered more important than others. This situation can pose a problem. Say for example a young researcher has come up with a new theory and wishes to publish the results of her research in a scholarly journal. The young researcher wants to present her research to a prestigious journal that will help her get tenure at her university. The research appears to be well done but it directly challenges the findings of more powerful and established researchers in the discipline. Some of these more established researchers will be on the review boards of major journals. It could very well happen that the young scholar's research will be rejected because there are flaws in her theory. The research could also be rejected because the journal review panel has a vested interest in keeping the older theory in place. These elders in the discipline may have a strong vested interest in the current theory and do not want to see it challenged. Either way the wider public will not learn of the young researchers theory. The point we wish to make in this
lesson is that academic knowledge production takes place in the real world
of politics and economics. This real world research environment affects
information seekers. The way academic disciplines structure knowledge also
affects searching. If you wish to effectively locate information you must
have some idea of how academic disciplines and libraries structure knowledge.
We will discuss these knowledge structures more in Lesson 2.
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