SRELS Journal of Information Management Vol. 47, No. 4, August 2010, Guest Editorial. p359-361. Guest Editorial: WHAT AILS LIS RESEARCH? MS Sridhar ‘Research is immoral if it fails to lead to the betterment of people’ — said Prof, Scarlettee, an European anthropologist living in a remote village near Mandya in Karnataka for last 55 years, Most research in humanities and in majority of natural and social sciences have no direct application in daily life. Generally researchers themselves value ‘pure research’ more than the ‘applied research’. Scholarly interest devoid of practical applications creates a vicious circle. Any research should give honest and serious thought to the utility of findings of the proposed research. There is an enormous increase in LIS research in the last three-four decades in the country and yet usable quality research output is disproportionately small. Serious concern regarding the decline in the quality of LIS research is also aited repeatedly by many. Of course, one silly . excuse is that the decline in quality of research is universal and not specific to LIS. Much of the increase in research activity and the deterioration in quality of research are obviously attributable to hasty degree-secking research in the universities. Innumerable run-of-the-mill dissertations and theses have oversimplified the research process and made rescarch somewhat like instant food fix with rampant use of copycat technology. , One of the reasons for such a situation appears to be overused and reused research designs and the abused methodologies and a total lack of new innovative methodologies. Problems relating to adoption and execution of innovative methodologies by LIS researchers and ways and means to ensure reliable and quality research are required to be urgently addressed. As a profound social activity, research connects us to ‘those who use it’ and to ‘those whose research we used’. This total integration with knowledge in the field and their practical applications require unreserved commitment to integrity. Looking at the kind of problems chosen for research, it surprises any one whether we are moving from the ‘known’ to ‘unknown’ or going round the loop of ‘known’ to ‘known’. One would wonder and ask the questions like, are there enough unique and novel research problems tackled in the profession? It is quite debatable as each research problem must be unique demanding unique research design and a unique combination of research methods and techniques. As a rule, leave alone stealing, researchers should not even borrow research problems. One has to find one’s research problem and a research a. 47, No.4, August 2010 359Guest Editor: Sridha ————————— oO oOo guide can only suggest an area of interest (broad area) for work and help in formulation of research problem. In this very first step, it is unfortunate that many wrongly considered suggested areas of interest or topics as their research problems, failing to move forward from an area of interest to broad topic, then to focused topic and then bombarding it with several questions to make it sentence specific statement to bring in wider significance to research problems. Stopping at broad topic level leads to accumulation of enormous data without clearly delimiting research problem and thus leading to repetition of work and efforts at the level of area of interest or topic without adding much to the knowledge and utility of LIS. As far as selection of research problems are concerned, it is highly debatable in terms of novelty as well as utility of findings whether compilation of bibliographies, citation analysis, design/ development of databases, portals, web sites, depth schedules for classification, thesaurus and the like qualify to be doctoral research works. ‘The main determinant of quality in research is good research design. A good research design is half the battle. It is easy to suggest a research problem but difficult to make a good research design. As explained above, each problem / research work is unique (novel) and demands unique research design & unique combination of methods & techniques. It may be difficult to pursue an ideal design. One may have to trade off between efforts & fruits. However, a good research design is comprehensive, flexible, appropriate to the purpose and objective. The design should consider many different aspects like efficiency, economy, maximum reliability, minimum biases, and smallest error preserving the objectivity, validity, reliability and generalizability. As part of the design all variables have to be identified & delimited. Researcher has to be cautious about differences concerning cause and effect. Appropriate methods and techniques have to be chosen based on objectives, possible implications of results, overall environment, current knowledge, suitability to problem, available resources, competence of researcher and kind of data required. LIS research is flourishing with either poor or lack of appropriate design and strong methodology. It is very unfortunate that the methodological flaws, inadequacies and problems are rarely debated and discussed to explore solutions to problems and improve tools of research. In the process LIS research uses template of earlier studies, slips into easy exploratory/ descriptive/ bibliometric studies/ surveys or case studies leading to data-dump. Such researchers hardly have any research protocol, plan and calendar. Lack of real research with experimental designs, decisive hypothesis testing and other innovative techniques with hard-data is the main reason for not able to produce useful findings and elevate the quality of LIS research. Appropriate research methodology need to be adopted for effective research and the benefits of methodology are manifold. In addition, LIS has the benefit of understanding research 360 SRELS Jl. Info. Mana;What ails LIS research procedure, ‘researcher’ as a user, the process of critical evaluation of literature, special interest and skills as well as attitude of others. One significant area LIS research has miserably lacked is methodological innovation. Post research evaluation should take place in every field to reveal how methodology and procedures could be improved. There is nothing contributed by voluminous LIS research towards betterment of research methodology. As far as abuse of methodology is concerned, one simple but typical example is relating to measures of use of library and library documents. Despite well established ways of measuring ‘ase’ of library and library documents since pre-automated era, and later easily available hard and reliable data in automated systems, many in LIS still resort to least reliable opinionnaire and ask users about their use of library and library documents. Unfortunately they think what respondents answer to their questionnaires as reliable use data, Similarly, with proliferation of bibliometric studies researchers are wrongly equating citations to use of documents without regard to the fact that authors do not cite all that they use and cite many even without using. Both opinions and citations can hardly substitute for hard use data acquired in the form of lent-out use, in-house use, downloaded use and responses to questions posed with critical incident technique. MS Sridhar Formerly Head, Library and Documentation, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore 560017 Address for communication: 1103, ‘Mirle House’, 19th B Main, JP Nagar, 2nd Phase, Bangalore - 560078 E-mail: mirlesridhar@ gmail.com Vol. 46, No. 4, August 2010 361