I've added a new category to my posts, Methods. Right now the only entries in it are this one and Presenting Data Visually. I was going to call the category "Research" and recognized quickly that that title was inaccurate. Let me explain. I go to lots of scientific and academic conferences. The majority of my RSS feeds are from people I meet there. I read at least one science journal a day and often several. I'm also on the email lists of several scientific organizations.
This doesn't make me an expert on these things by any stretch. What it does give me is a bias regarding the quality of information that comes at me in a given day and that bias is telling.
I was at a conference last week. Many people were presenting their research. I was going to write "...their...umm...research." and here's where my bias comes in.If you do the field work yourself, if you're in the lab doing the experiment, if you are hands on investigating, calibrating, redacting, compiling, ..., then you're doing primary research. If you're the first person in a field to do such exploring, you're doing original research. If you are interviewing others about what they did, how they did it and what the results are, that's secondary research, what the courts call "hearsay" (I think that's what it's called), and are pretty much reporting on someone else's work (which is a fine and noble thing to do. It makes you a journalist, not a researcher).
I have no problem with people doing secondary research. Don't present it as either primary or original work. Also, if you're presenting secondary research and you've determined a pattern exists in the primary results that the original investigator didn't recognize, claim that credit for yourself, don't indicate that your determination was part of the original investigator's work.
Am I walking a fine line here? I don't think so. Someone who goes out and talks with a group of people in their environment (aka "Tally's Corner") is doing primary (and possibly original) research. The individual who reads "Tally's Corner", "Street Corner Society", "Slim's Table" and half a dozen other such works for a presentation is reading books for a presentation. What they have to offer may be critically important to the field and is not primary research.
So when you give a presentation on something like how successful some corporations have been in achieving a goal and are doing it by talking with some of the people involved months if not years after the fact, it's interesting and not duplicatable, primary research.
(more to follow)
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