Down the Rabbit Hole of Research

“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” 

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

As an English student much of my time is spent reading scholarly, literary articles as opposed to scientific reports or data analysis, and the questions of falling into the "trap" or "down the rabbit hole" of research are often very different. Likely no great harm will come from a plagiarized literature essay as opposed to the immense physical harm that came from something like Dr. Potti's errors. Still, in all fields of academia plagiarism (however you'd like to define it here) is viewed as the ultimate "sin" that irrevocably mars a scholars work. And yet, it happens. Continuously. Thus I think the problem of avoiding the "trap" is not limited to issues just within the scientific community but to the pressures of academia as a whole. As someone mentioned in class on Thursday, there is immense pressure to publish, and not just to publish, but to continually generate new, cutting-edge scholarship. Pride is undoubtably tied up in this problem both in the sense of needing to produce innovative work and resorting to bad research methods to do this, and in the inability to admit when a mistake is made. I cannot say that there is necessarily a clear-cut solution to this, but I think a good step would be in recognizing that not every paper published or study done will produce monumental results, but they will produce something that contributes to the greater good either in scholarship or humanity. I think Dr. Oyen articulated this point well in class when she said that research would likely be very different if even the person on the "lowest" rung of a research team was able to recognize too that they are curing cancer. I think it is a matter of recognizing the importance of the building blocks as opposed to constantly seeking out a perfect, complete final solution.