Fun with Academic Research (featuring Sammy Castonguay)

When Christina or I visit your classrooms to talk to you about information literacy, we often place emphasis on the importance of peer reviewed research. You may remember from class that to be labeled “peer reviewed,” a research article has to be evaluated by a panel of experts in the appropriate academic field prior to acceptance and publication by an academic journal. The peer review process maintains the scientific standards of research publications.

When we choose to use peer reviewed articles as sources in our own research writing, we are acting as information consumers: our goal is to draw conclusions from the most reliable information we can find about our topic. This enhances our credibility as scholarly writers. But what is it like to be on the other side of the process, as a creator of academic research? 

Sammy Castonguay

Our favorite flower-wearing Earth sciences professor Sammy Castonguay recently co-wrote a peer-reviewed article that was published in the Journal of the Geological Society. You can read the whole article, “Precambrian Olistoliths Masquerading as Sills from Death Valley, California,” on the journal’s website. If we take a look at the provenance of this article, three themes about academic research emerge:

Academic research is an ongoing process. 
Academic research is collaborative. 
Academic research undergoes intense revision.

Sammy took his initial research trip to the Black Mountains in Death Valley, on which he collected the samples of zircons that eventually became part of this study, in 2013. That means that the research article we can access through a database in a matter of minutes was four years in the making. And, when Sammy collected and analyzed these samples, he had a completely different end-product in mind: he hoped to work with a fellow researcher to develop an SEPM field trip guide.

Of course, Sammy didn't do the work for the final publication on his own. He analyzed his sample at the LaserChron lab at Arizona State University in 2014. Another researcher, lead author Thomas Vandyk, got in touch with Sammy to build off of the sample, leading to this collaboration. The two worked back and forth for several months to integrate their results. With the research and work of all the authors on the paper--there are fifteen!--Vandyk reached the conclusions presented in this article.

But this is a peer reviewed article, remember? The article was thoroughly revised prior to submission to the Journal of the Geological Society, and then continued to be revised on the recommendations of the editor and the peer reviewers. So, while the authors submitted their article in January 2017, their revisions were not complete until December 2017.

The academic research cycle continues. While the study does present several conclusions, it also raises several questions. As Sammy told me, "Any good scientific study should raise more questions than answered." Now, other researchers in the field can chase this line of inquiry to its conclusion, and in turn raise more questions.

What questions have you raised in your own research papers? What research lines would you like to pursue?