The knowledge lost in information

The current position paper is a brief account of the pitfalls I have found in the research manuscripts I have reviewed over a period of twenty years. As a review panel member of several academic journals, I encountered several problems in the submissions I have been asked to review, both minor ones and those beyond repair. In this paper, I intend to report my observations with a focus on what I may call unsophisticated and simplistic treatment of the findings. To put it briefly, while some submissions are rightly rejected due to sloppy data collection, biased sampling, or erroneous use of statistics, there are papers that succeed in following the strict methodological do’s and don’ts of research but fail to make sense of the bulk of the collected data, leading to fixation at the lower levels of Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy. I will try to address this issue, postulating that inadequate practice of critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills such as analytical reasoning, evaluation, and inference could be partly responsible for this caveat. The paper ends with suggestions for educating would-be researchers not only by teaching the principles of conducting research but also by encouraging creativity, critical evaluation of information, and a genuine search for knowledge. Such qualities may not readily lend themselves to objective measurement and can hardly be translated into numerical indices by which research impact is estimated but they seem to add to the meaningfulness of research findings in the field.