Notice how the everyday research we’ve discussed so far has all started from questions: Which phone should I buy? Which restaurant makes the best empanadas in Houston? How can I recycle plastic bags? These are relatively simple fact-finding questions, but even highly complex academic research projects are built on research questions—many of which are actually quite straightforward.

Impressive-looking machinery in the Large Hadron Collider.

Consider the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one of the biggest, most powerful, most expensive scientific instruments ever built. It’s a 17-mile ring of superconducting magnets that accelerates subatomic particles to outrageous speeds and then whacks them into each other. If we visit the website for the LHC and look under the heading “What are the main goals of the LHC?”, we don’t see an impenetrable wall of scientific jargon; instead, we find a few simply-worded questions:

• “What is the origin of mass?”
• “What are dark matter and dark energy?”
• “Why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?”
• “How does the quark-gluon plasma give rise to the particles that constitute the matter of our Universe?” (OK, that one’s a bit gnarly.)

Granted, understanding what these questions really mean would take a lot of scientific knowledge, but the questions themselves are simple and direct.

It’s not just the physical scientists who start their research from simple questions.

Writer and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom

Near the beginning of Thick, a volume of her essays, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom describes the questions that drive her writing: “That’s where my essays always begin, by interrogating why me and not my grandmother? Why now and not then? Why this U.S. and not some other U.S.? What, more simply, does my social location say about our society?” (27) In McMillan Cottom’s telling, these essays, which often address complex social and cultural questions through a theory-driven sociological viewpoint, start from straightforward questions—the kind of questions you don’t have to be a Ph.D.sociologist to ask: Why do I have opportunities my grandmother didn’t? How is my story like and unlike other peoples’ stories in our society?

This, then, is the link between small-scale fact-finding and academic research: both start from questions.

Being aware of the underlying questions in research can help you figure out why the research was undertaken in the first place. If you’re looking at a particular piece of research writing and you find yourself asking “so what?”, try to determine what the inciting questions might be.  Often, stating these questions can make you aware of the intention and significance of the work.