The Critical Assessment of Research

6

Moving beyond the gold standards: tools and techniques

Introduction

In the last three chapters we looked at some of the ways that research can be influenced by economic and ideological interests – factors that are supposedly extraneous to the work of science and scholarship. Our aim in examining these cases was to call attention to some of the potentially problematic issues that can affect research. Awareness of these issues does not by itself, however, provide us with the information we need for critical assessment. It is one thing to be aware that financial conflicts of interest may affect either the research itself or its dissemination; it is another to search for and find information that may help us to see if in a particular case there ...