To solve problems, researchers may employ a range of methods. Each discipline has its own methods for making or vetting knowledge claims. In Psychology, for example, experimentation with human subjects is quite common, but it is less common in Mathematics. Part of becoming a skilled researcher is learning the epistemology of one’s discipline. Say a mathematician was trying to solve an equation that had not yet been solved. If the approach was to put twenty people in a room and watch how they solved it, other scholars in the discipline would not take the results seriously, but if something similar were done by a psychologist, the results could be quite important (see Research

Now imagine that you are doing academic work or professional research. You are a member of a discipline or profession and you have a good idea of the foundational texts for your research topic. A bit of reading you have done has caught your attention: perhaps a text, newspaper article, or journal article. You begin to question how this reading fits in with what you know about your discipline. First you search to see if scholars have been writing about this question (textual research). They may have answered it, but most likely, they have not yet come to a firm conclusion. You decide to do some research on your own to try to answer the question.

Thus, as they engage in inquiry, researchers will choose methods based on the values of the Communities of Practitioners in their disciplines. They may sift through research publications across disciplines with hopes of synthesizing published information in a new way; test past research claims in a lab; or interview people.