What is Research?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the biggest funder of health research in the U.S. The NIH uses the term "biomedical" to mean any field where research affects human health. So you will hear this term even when people are talking about research that isn't in biology or medicine. Biomedical research, in the NIH sense, can include any of the other kinds of research listed on this page: social, clinical, bench lab, translational...and many, many fields and careers.

For instance, a biomedical researcher working on diabetes may be a doctor asking how patients respond to drugs; a computer scientist asking the same question using data from hospital records; a neurobiologist asking questions about insulin and brain chemistry; a physical therapist asking what exercise programs are effective for folks with neuropathy; an engineer designing prosthetic limbs; a social worker interviewing diabetic people about what helps most; a botanist working with their indigenous community to identify traditional food plants; a public health professional or psychologist asking how children in Portland and Pago Pago deal with stereotypes about food, culture, and body image. Biomedical research happens in dozens of fields, and topics from nanomaterials to global warming to African-American history can be part of it.

Clinical research works with patients in hospitals, clinics, and medical offices and centers. It can ask all kinds of research questions, but answers them by doing studies with patients (medical, dental, speech therapy, etc.), or with cells, images like X-rays or MRIs, or tissues from patients. Some clinical researchers are also clinical providers (licensed professionals who provide health services: doctors, dentists, nurses, therapists, etc.). Some are researchers with other training (like a PhD or other doctorate, or a Master of Public Health degree) who don't directly provide clinical care to patients, but work on research projects with people who do.

Depending on their training and interests, a person working on a clinical research project may interact with patients without doing clinical care (tasks like interviewing patients and helping families with appointments), do clinical care (tasks like drawing blood samples or giving a diagnosis), or not interact with patients at all (tasks like doing data analysis on a computer, or looking for previous research studies on the topic).

People who want to become clinical providers need experience working with patients in clinical settings. One way is through research. Clinical research experience is valuable for undergraduates asking questions like "Is medical school right for me?" It gives you a practical chance to see different ways to balance your interests in helping individuals with your interests in solving problems that affect lots of people.

Social research asks questions about social issues and social phenomena: how people interact with each other, with social systems (such as schools, governments, transportation, housing, etc.), and with social ideas like access, safety, ability, intelligence, race, identity, and value. Social researchers often interview people or do surveys. They may do research where the community or group their project studies has a voice in what the research will study, how it will happen, and/or what will be done with the results. There are many forms of this type of research, including Community-Engaged Research, Community-Based Participatory Research, and Participatory Action Research.

Depending on their training and interests, social researchers may be closely connected to work to create a social change, or may act more as observers and recorders, finding out and sharing information about what people's needs, values, and choices are in a particular situation. It may depend on how much information about the situation is already known outside of the community. Social researchers may or may not identify as members of a community they research, or people in the situation they're studying. Often it varies from project to project, or in different parts of a project, since social questions may involve multiple groups. Some social researchers talk with people; others use existing data (from maps, population records, surveys, online games, previous interviews, etc.). Many use both.

Many fields do social research, including psychology, social work, sociology, education, public health, and geography. All social researchers need access to social groups and communities who can respond to their research questions; people get this access through their own backgrounds and cultures, and through working with people from others.

Social research experience teaches practical ways to work ethically with people--from your own background and/or other backgrounds--whose experiences and needs are different. It's valuable for undergraduates who know they want careers working with people, but don't want to do clinical care. Participating in social research can help people underrepresented in science see ways their lived experience is valuable to gaining new scientific knowledge, and figure out what they are interested in studying, separate from social expectations about what groups or topics they "should be" or "shouldn't be" interested in.

Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and related fields (like Biochemistry) are traditionally called the Natural Sciences. A lot of research in these fields happens at a laboratory bench (a long table), with chemicals, materials, and equipment. You will hear research in these fields called bench lab research. In bioscience, this kind of lab is often called a wet lab (living things are wet). This kind of research is what you usually see called "research" on television.

Modern bench lab research often works just as much with computers as with chemicals and hand tools. Topics from climate change to new diseases, from creating lasers to creating new drugs, can be studied in a bench lab by researchers in fields from neurobiology to engineering.

Bench or wet lab research may study almost any topic, but the way it investigates questions is rewarding for people with lots of curiosity and particular skills and interests. Lab experiments often have to be repeated many times, with minor changes, under controlled conditions. Large amounts of detailed data come together over time to make a picture of what happens in a system as the result of one small change. It's like putting together a puzzle.

People who are detail-oriented, like to set up a mini-environment or situation they can control and then enjoy being curious about what happens, have good eye-hand coordination, are interested in data, and like to solve problems step by step, often find they like bench research. Bench research usually involves working alone some of the time, but it also involves collaboration: it takes many researchers doing experiments and observations over time to build new knowledge.

Translational research takes knowledge from one area of research and applies ("translates") it to another. Most often, translational research takes findings from bench lab/wet lab or social research and applies it to clinical settings: how can this information be used to help patients and people in healthcare systems?

One example of translational research: since the invention of computer records systems, the amount of data that exists has grown enormously (it's sometimes called Big Data). Data scientists can now ask a research question, and see if all this existing data can answer it. For instance, can we learn if treatment X or Y is more effective by mathematically analyzing the millions of patient records from big hospitals over the past 20 years to see what happened to similar patients who were given treatment X vs treatment Y? In this case, knowledge can be translated from data science to medicine.

Another example of translational research is when a social research project asks about traditional health care practices in a culture, and brings that knowledge to current health care providers serving that culture.

Researchers who do translational research can come from any field. They may have degrees in more than one field, and so have the tools to translate knowledge between those fields. Teams of people from different fields often do translational research projects together. They may have met by going to school together and then realizing they wanted to do different things for their next degree. They may have met by being interested in the same topic at a conference and talking together about it. They may have met by working on another translational research project.

Getting involved in a translational research project is a great way to meet people with different degrees in different fields, and get a sense of how different fields approach the same question. The field does not decide which topics you can study, just how you ask the questions. Every scientific field has its own culture and style: look for what fits you best as a person, and move forward in the environments that reward your curiosity and work for your needs and goals.

Basic research may happen in any field. It's just the name for research that asks a question in order to find out new knowledge, even though we don't know yet what kinds of practical use that knowledge might have. Example of basic research questions: How many species of fungi live on the island of Maui? What are the chemical components of garden sage? What happens when we combine compound X with compound Y (we don't know why we're asking yet, but don't you want to know...)?

Field research is the term for any research project where the researcher goes out to do the research in the environment where what they are studying lives. The term is sometimes used in social research: a field project might observe people's behavior in a city square, rather than in a controlled experiment, or go door to door asking people to do a survey, rather than asking them to come to a site to take it. The term is most often used in bioscience: some biologists do research in wet labs, working with computers and samples and cultures; some do field research, working in a forest or river or on a green roof in a city. Many do both. Many biological research projects involve both field and lab work.