---
title: "Research"
chunk: 6/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:17:07.385102+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Academic publishing is a system that is necessary for academic scholars to peer review the work and make it available for a wider audience. The system varies widely by field and is also always changing, if often slowly. Most academic work is published in journal article or book form. There is also a large body of research that exists in either a thesis or dissertation form. These forms of research can be found in databases explicitly for theses and dissertations. In publishing, STM publishing is an abbreviation for academic publications in science, technology, and medicine.
Most established academic fields have their own scientific journals and other outlets for publication, though many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary, and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. The kinds of publications that are accepted as contributions of knowledge or research vary greatly between fields, from the print to the electronic format. A study suggests that researchers should not give great consideration to findings that are not replicated frequently. It has also been suggested that all published studies should be subjected to some measure for assessing the validity or reliability of its procedures to prevent the publication of unproven findings. Business models are different in the electronic environment. Since about the early 1990s, licensing of electronic resources, particularly journals, has been very common. Presently, a major trend, particularly with respect to scholarly journals, is open access. There are two main forms of open access: open access publishing, in which the articles or the whole journal is freely available from the time of publication, and self-archiving, where the author makes a copy of their own work freely available on the web.

== Research statistics and funding ==

Most funding for scientific research comes from three major sources: corporate research and development departments; private foundations; and government research councils such as the National Institutes of Health in the US and the Medical Research Council in the UK. These are managed primarily through universities and in some cases through military contractors. Many senior researchers (such as group leaders) spend a significant amount of their time applying for grants for research funds. These grants are necessary not only for researchers to carry out their research but also as a source of merit. The Social Psychology Network provides a comprehensive list of U.S. Government and private foundation funding sources.
The total number of researchers (full-time equivalents) per million inhabitants for individual countries is shown in the following table.

Research expenditure by type of research as a share of GDP for individual countries is shown in the following table.

== See also ==

== Notes ==

== References ==

== Sources ==
Creswell, John W. (2008). Educational Research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 978-0-13-613550-0.
Kara, Helen (2012). Research and Evaluation for Busy Practitioners: A Time-Saving Guide. Bristol: The Policy Press. ISBN 978-1-44730-115-8.

== Further reading ==
Groh, Arnold (2018). Research Methods in Indigenous Contexts. New York: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-72774-5.
Cohen, N.; Arieli, T. (2011). "Field research in conflict environments: Methodological challenges and snowball sampling". Journal of Peace Research. 48 (4): 423–436. doi:10.1177/0022343311405698. S2CID 145328311.
Soeters, Joseph; Shields, Patricia and Rietjens, Sebastiaan. 2014. Handbook of Research Methods in Military Studies New York: Routledge.
Talja, Sanna and Pamela J. Mckenzie (2007). Editor's Introduction: Special Issue on Discursive Approaches to Information Seeking in Context, The University of Chicago Press.

== External links ==

 The dictionary definition of research at Wiktionary
 Quotations related to Research at Wikiquote
 Media related to Research at Wikimedia Commons