ABSTRACT
Scholarship - as I shall use the term - refers to the reading and interpretation of literature and the writing of literature reviews. Thus defined you can be a scholar without being a researcher, but not vice versa. I am well aware that myoid mentor Peter Wason would question my introduction of scholarship so early in a book on research as he notoriously advised his PhD students to run their experiments first and read the literature afterwards (Evans & Johnson-Laird, 2003). Wason's concern was with creativity: he felt that if you spent too much time studying other people's ideas it would inhibit your ability to produce your own. I think he may have been overly influenced by one of his former research students who scarcely published a paper after taking up his lectureship, despite encyclopaedic knowledge of the literature. It was said of him by his students that if you asked him a question, he gave you a reference! I will return to the origin of ideas later in the chapter. For the present, the point is that science is a collective international activity. You have to advance knowledge of the subject as a whole, not just your personal knowledge, so it is necessary to understand the relevant literature and to place your own work in this context. If you fail to do so, the journals will swiftly reject your papers.
