How to Get to Research Clarity Faster in 3 Steps (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: There's a moment in every researcher's journey when the chaos ends. Everything suddenly snaps into place. The data makes sense. The argument tightens. The code works. It finally all fits. That moment is the reason we do research. I'm Professor David Stuckler and I've published over 300 peer review papers in international journals and coached and mentored countless others to do the same. And what I've learned is that the scientific enterprise is all about this, taming chaos. Every research project, every research paper starts from a messy place. Our goal is to find an order in this disorder, to go from chaos to clarity. And that clarity is the reward you experience when you finally get there. And it is an incredibly satisfying feeling when you experience that moment of enlightenment, that joy of discovery, that clarity when it all finally fits into place. It's like you can finally exhale after that long, arduous journey of trying to make sense of the data and its order in all its messiness. Every researcher experiences this arc, whether you're in the humanities on one side or physics and the hard sciences on the others. And today I want to talk about a three-step framework that I found that can help you experience this click, this moment of enlightenment when it all snaps into place faster. And this really came out of one of the workshops we did this week with researchers in our inner circle. This is an elite mentorship program. If you're interested in being a part of that, click the link below. But I was working with a doctor, a cosmetic surgeon, who was lost in the weeds, lost in the trees and losing sight of the big picture and the research question until we finally followed these three steps and it snapped. And as you can see in the quote from her, it was as though she could see the whole paper now for the first time and it all finally fit. It's just a deeply satisfying moment that vicariously I get to experience again and again through working with and collaborating with several of our researchers. So let's dive in so you can see how you can get this kind of click into place moment yourself. The first powerful thing you can do to the odds in your favor for finding this natural order is to really pay attention to finding the structure. The structure is that natural order in your data. It's going to be the natural order when you write your paper. There isn't always one structure to your data, but there is one that's going to feel like it fits the data best. And there are common ways you can look for this structure. Sometimes what you're doing is you're taking reality and you're slicing it in different angles using different methods, different tools, perturbing your perspective to see it from different angles. But you will find one that fits best. Sometimes you're looking for just a whisper in the data and it can be hard to see in one angle. So what you need to do is make sure you've mapped out your data and you've experienced multiple structures. One common mistake I see here for researchers is trying to mix writing the paper with writing to try to figure out the analysis. So what you need to do is if you're writing you're just dumping things on a page and you're wrestling with the writing to try to get clarity and make sense of things and find that natural order, that's okay. Just be willing to dispose that writing and understand you're doing that for a different purpose. Finding that structure is also why I like to ensure that you have the narrative arc of your paper before you even start writing. Common natural structuring can come from a test around your hypothesis. It can come from staying really focused on your research question. It can be differentiating the paper by outcomes. If you use something in defining your question called a PICO model, check out the link below for how to do that. It helps ensure you've got a research topic really well defined and clear. Usually those elements of the PICO, your population, intervention, comparison, outcome, those are elements that you can also use different slices to perturb your data that can illuminate and help you get insight on the messiness. For quantitative papers, structure often follows your identification strategy, what you're using to identify causal relationships. For qualitative research, it often emerges as a narrative logic. It's an emergent narrative and emergent themes that come from your interview data. For literature reviews, structure is often going to follow a conceptual map. Again, these are just broad contours, but the point is your job is discovery is to identify that structure that creates order from disorder, effectively reducing entropy in your data. Step two, this is ruthless, I want you to stay focused on your research question. Look, we're researchers. We're inherently quite curious creatures. It's very easy to go down a rabbit hole or like squirrels chasing that acorn over there and then over there and then over there, but you want your structure and your research answers to your questions to look more like a straight line by the end of it. Sure, you might have followed a spaghetti path to find it, but that's not how you want to proceed afterwards. So, out of that spaghetti path, you need to get to linearity and you need to get to clarity. One way to do this, again, is to stay ruthlessly focused on your research question. So, ask yourself, is this analysis I'm doing right now relevant to my research question? If so, look, it can be great to stoke creativity and lead to other papers, but it might not get you the answer for this question. Yes, there is an advantage to playing with your data, again, but really, better practice is not what some researchers do, is they kind of play around, fiddle with some numbers and statistics, and then find something interesting. So, you really, as good scientists, want to stick with your a priori research question and stick ruthlessly. It's not good scientific practice to just start fiddling around with numbers to find something, say, in quantitative work that's significant, and then write a story around that. That's not reproducible and it's just going to produce a bunch of junk and noise in the literature. I want you to embark on this path of discovery as scientists, and only then will you get that click, that through-click moment when things fall into place and your data bends your will and really answer in a satisfying way your research question. My third tip is to embed structure in your analysis from the beginning. And one of the ways to do this is with a tool called a DAG, a direct acyclic graph, really just a logic model, that will force you to impose a clear conceptual logic of the causal pathways you want to look at. And sometimes I've found some researchers, they're looking at x to y to z to a to b to z and it's just going too far. And actually, they need to prune that causal logic and stay focused to find the structure that they're looking for. This will also really help you clarify your analysis and your research questions. It's going to help you with appreciating steps to stay ruthlessly focused on your research question. In many of the lit reviews I deal with where people are going off piste and getting lost, they might be going too far down the causal chain where they really just need to break off a few pieces of the causal chain, maybe this branch here or that branch there. And that forms the basis of different sections and helps them create conceptual flow. And once you get that structure in place, insights just kind of brew out of that disorder to the surface that you can find. Again, it's deeply satisfying. So just bear in mind, creating these DAGs for yourself. I encourage every researcher to do this no matter what your field is in. It's not just a causal identification tool, it's a clarity tool. So look, no single element here alone is really going to help that magic happen for it all to click into place. But finding the structure, keeping focused, and containing your project make that magic more likely to happen and happen faster. So that click, that joy, that order in your data can finally emerge. Suddenly, everything feels light and not heavy and it just all fits. If you're interested in getting to that click moment faster, click the link below. Set up a no pressure one-to-one call with myself or a member of our team and let's see if we're a good fit to work together. For now, you're not going to want to miss this video on some of our best publishing strategy tips and tactics.