Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-14-2025
Abstract
Early-career materials researchers often receive guidance from their individual advisors on best practices for conducting research, but the materials science community lacks an explicit model of the research process. As a result, the lived experience of an individual researcher can be quite different from their peers since they may be exposed to a different unique set of implicit research steps. In this article, we translate an existing research heuristic from other fields and make explicit the steps, methodologies, and strategies materials science engineering researchers utilize to advance our collective materials science knowledge. This newly proposed research cycle can improve the experience of both those early-career and established researchers by providing common expectations, increase the return-on-investment for research sponsors by encouraging robust planning, and increase the impact of our collective research work by encouraging knowledge development. This new research cycle for materials science and engineering clearly emphasizes that all researchers should review literature throughout a research cycle rather than just being conducted once during the initiation steps. In addition, researchers should consider incorporating engineering design principles when planning their experimental or computational research studies.
Keywords
research cycle, knowledge, research community, methodology
Language
English
Publication Title
MRS Bulletin
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Carter, J.L.W., Kennedy, M.S. Conceptualizing the research cycle for the field of materials science and engineering. MRS Bulletin 50, 886–893 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-025-00931-w
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version