Some notes on originality

Here are some ways that your research can be original:

1. You can look at topics that people in your discipline have not looked at before.

2. You can add to knowledge in a way that has not been done before.

3. You can test existing knowledge in an original way.

4. You can provide a single original technique, observation or result in an otherwise unoriginal but competent piece of research.

5. You can bring new evidence to bear an old issue.

6. You can say something nobody has said before: this will work if you can show how your investigation provides a justification for your new saying.

7. You can carry out empirical work that has not been done before: this will work if you can use it to support existing knowledge or to show the limitations of existing assumptions.

8. You can make a synthesis of things that have not been put together before.

9. You can make a new interpretation of someone else’s material or ideas: this will work if your interpretation can be shown to shed new light on the things they were investigating.

10. You can take a technique and apply it to a new area. People will want to know if it works in that area, or if a new theory is needed there.

11. You can be cross-disciplinary and use different methodologies.

You get the idea - I hope... I am sure you can add lots more ways for your contribution to be original.

No blog entry on originality in research can be regarded as useful if it does not deal with two famous quotations, both of which strike a chord in every piece of research:

Voltaire is quoted as saying: "Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor’s, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

It is no disrespect to the great men of science if we use their ideas as a starting point for our own, and/or come up with alternative or improved theories. It is no disrespect to their stature either if we summarise their ideas, condensing them into a preface for our own contribution. The key aphorism here is the one about how dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants can see more and further because the giants lift them up. Poor footnoting in Robert Burton's 1623 preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy confused the scholarly trail here. Isaac Newton famously used the phrase in 1675. For me the phrase stands as the epitome of the twelfth-century renaissance and this is where the earliest known version is from (John of Salisbury 1159, Roger Bacon 1267).

The real basis of today's research tradition, however, is from Francis Bacon's Instauratio Magna (1620). His lasting contribution to research methodology was to require public evidence for every assertion, and create a path that anyone can follow. I will return to this theme soon.

References:
Merton, Robert K.: On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (Houghton Mifflin, 1985) 978-0151699629. [The above paragraph on the aphorism was updated in 2013 in homage to the update to the Wikipedia article.]

See Wikiquote: "Plusieurs auteurs anglais nous ont copiés, et n'en ont rien dit. Il en est des livres comme du feu de nos foyers; on va prendre ce feu chez son voisin, on l’allume chez soi, on le communique à d’autres, et il appartient à tous. " [updated 2013]