WHAT IS A RESEARCH

Most people conduct research for just the degree they are looking for. They do the research for just to grab the degree, that is all. In fact there are two approaches or to objectives for conducting a research. The first one is the traditional way of conducting a research which is conducting a research for only filling knowledge gap. This kind of people in doing the research consult only books, journal, conference papers and they try to find where the research gap is even if the research is trivial and not important the researcher will insist to conduct the research in the area. Unfortunately most traditional researchers do this form of research, they just try to find only a gap in research especially in management and management information system, people try to find just a gap, for the reason of filling the gap and publish paper and they say we have a research, we have available research, but I don’t think so, just to fill knowledge gap is not a big deal, hence it is not a research.

On the other hand, the other people feel that research is just to solve a problem. This kind of people, we can call them consultants. They look at the problem at different perspectives, they contact the company and understand the problem of the company and try to solve the problem of the company. Unfortunately, this kind of people don’t look at books as the others do, they try to write one or two books, four or five journals and that is it and they try to solve the problem from their own experience, however,they don’t look deep into literature review as the first group do. The problem here is that this people may end up repeating what others have done because they don’t know what others have done in that area and they have a major problem.

Therefore, as can be seen, the two groups are not purely right. The first group misses the problem solving nature of every research, while the second group may end up repeating what others have done since they don’t engage in thorough literature review. They end up not filling the knowledge gap. What then is real research?

The real research is being somewhere in between the two groups: "filling knowledge gap and solve a problem". You can be anywhere in between but in most cases you have a condition. The first condition is that you have to solve a problem but before solving a problem you must do a RE---search. What is a re-search? You have to search books and papers to check if someone has solved similar problem before, even if someone has done the research, you can criticize the person to find a knowledge gap.

Therefore, research involves solving a problem and filling knowledge gap at the same time.