Evaluation of Research Work - Good or Bad?

Various criteria are set to how a research study should be properly assessed. There are different standards on how to define and identify if a research work is good. It varies accordingly to reviewers of diverse analysis and method of evaluation.

There are different kinds of research works, however the decisive factor for evaluation are comparable in ways. According to answers.com, a good research is well-informed, thorough, intelligent, and systematic, allows for the possibility that one may be mistaken and allows for verification. A good research should be knowledgeable with its subject. It should also be detailed with information regarding the focus of the study. The research must take on specific methods; it must be organized and ordered. Moreover, it should be falsifiable and should considerably be confirmed and be verified.

The study should be able to answer and support all questions related to the topic. It should contain sufficient information and resources to back up the study. If it takes on statistical matters, it must be precise and accurate. Figures and diagrams have to be explained and elaborated in manners that it can be understood. The terminologies to be used should be simple and clear.

Taken from the reportbd.com (2009), a research should satisfy the certain criteria. The purpose of the research should be clearly defined and common concepts be used. The research procedure used should be described in sufficient detail to permit another researcher to repeat the research for further advancement, keeping the continuity of what has already been attained. The procedural design of the research should be carefully planned to yield results that are as objectives as possible. The researcher should report with complete frankness, flaws in procedural design and estimate their effects upon the findings. The analysis of data should be sufficiently adequate to reveal its significance and the methods of analysis used should be appropriate. The validity and reliability of the data should be checked carefully. Conclusions should be confined to those justified by the data of the research and limited to those for which the data provide an adequate basis. Greater confidence in research is warranted if the researcher is experienced, has a good reputation in research and is a person of integrity.

According to faculty.goucher.edu (2009), how the research paper is evaluated is based on four (4) criteria. These are sources, thesis, audience and mechanics and documentation. This article is mainly intended for the research paper evaluation of students. With regard to the sources, it inquires if the paper uses the right kinds of scholarly or popular-scholarly sources to support its claims? It refers to the consideration if the resources used in supporting the paper are intellectual and logical enough. Is the paper based on at least some recent article-length sources? Articles are the sources of the most recent and most tightly focused analysis on your topic. Having updated source of information are also significant. Gathering latest information and updates on related topic should be observed. Are the sources recent enough to be persuasive? Scholarship in the social and natural sciences becomes outdated quickly. Conclusions based on out of date evidence fail to persuade. Students who want to succeed in these majors must become persistent enough researchers to seek out the most recent and authoritative sources on their topics. Humanities sources have undergone immense theoretical upheavals in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, and for many fields, secondary scholarship written much before 1980 can be suspect or unacceptable because its analytical methods are controlled by theoretical assumptions that are no longer acceptable. The fields cannot engage in wholesale book-burning and web-site erasure to eliminate these problematic sources, but an early part of Humanities' majors' upper-division work involves becoming familiar with the currently acceptable theories and analytical methods, and with the sources from earlier scholars work which are still acceptable.

Next is about thesis. Is the paper organized by an independent thesis which at least uses reasoning and/or evidence from one article to contribute substantively to the reasoning and/or evidence in any other article, thus avoiding mere summary of the research? Is the thesis carefully composed to avoid claiming absolute knowledge if its evidence supports only possible or probable conclusions? Is the thesis supported by logically sound reasoning?
These questions are asking whether the author has moved beyond the stage of merely reporting what others say, and into the stage of being able to think creatively about the topic. Early attempts to do this may be tentative and uncertain. To protect your reputation for careful thinking, make sure you distinguish clearly among certain, probable, and possible conclusions. Be content to claim your conclusions are "possibly" correct unless you can eliminate many of the contending conclusions to claim they are "probably' correct. Do not claim your conclusions "certainly" explain the evidence unless you have eliminated all alternative explanations. Logical fallacies often arise because writers unconsciously struggle to force their research to support to their earliest intuitions, guesses, hunches, or hypotheses about what is true. (Think of how often you heard high-school writers say "I'm going to do some research to get sources that support my thesis.") Beware your own prejudices about what you think the evidence will reveal before you've impartially examined it. Let the evidence speak and you can hardly go far wrong.

III. Audience: Does the paper address a scholarly audience and correctly estimate the level of knowledge that audience can be expected to possess? Does it avoid telling experts obvious things, like defining terms of art or basic concepts, providing needless "background," and identifying experts to each other with unnecessary specificity (e.g., "the biologist Lewis Thomas" in a paper addressed to biologists)? Does it always specify the source of generalizations about evidence by correct citations of scholarship?

IV. Mechanics and Documentation: Does the paper use standard academic English usage and sentence construction, coherent and well-ordered paragraphs, logical paragraph transition, and a fully functional title, introduction, and conclusion? Does the paper accurately and consistently use a documentation style appropriate to the discipline (MLA, APA, CBE, or U. Chicago), or does it at least use MLA style accurately and consistently?

Be especially careful when using terms of art and jargon from the discipline you're just entering. As an "apprentice," you may make mistakes that a more experienced scholar would not make, and they're the kind of mistakes that damage your authority, so you should pay special attention to those peculiar kinds of words and phrases.
Double your efforts to proofread your final draft in order to catch these old errors that will come back when you least want them to appear. You can prevent one typical source of dangerous errors if you start your paper's first draft with a list of sources as you accumulate them in your research, properly formatted in the documentation style appropriate for your topic's discipline. This is far to important to leave for the last five minutes of the writing process, and if you develop the habit of doing it early you will save yourself countless disappointments in later papers. Just build the paper on top of that source list, and add to it every time you develop a new source, and you can spend your last hours polishing your prose rather than worrying about documentation format.

The citations I have itemized are some references of how a research work is evaluated. As I have mentioned, there are various ways of evaluating a research work and it usually varies on the critic or reviewer. To further analyze and weigh up the appropriate procedures of evaluation, additional comprehension of the range should be performed.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_qualities_of_good_research
http://www.reportbd.com/articles/57/1/Criteria-Qualities-of-Good-Scientific-Research/Page1.html
http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng105sanders/research_paper_evaluation_criter.htm