Research problem as a key aspect of scientific publications in a sociological journal

Abstract

The text is devoted to the formulation of a research problem in an article for a sociological journal. The purpose of the article is didactic in nature and is aimed at improving the culture of writing academic text through the articulation of a research problem. The text presents all stages of pre-research practice: searching for a topic, reviewing the literature, fixing a problem situation, formulating a research problem and research questions. The peculiarity of the article is that it is based on many years of experience as a reviewer for the journal “Sociological research”, and the examples are manuscripts and publications sent to the journal. The articles are randomly selected and do not serve as a template for writing good articles, but rather to demonstrate some possible options. An important place in the work is given to the creative process of problematization. Problematization is perhaps the most difficult pre-research procedure, since a significant part of it is located in the “black box” of the researcher’s thought process. The essence of problematization is the process of deriving a new problem from existing knowledge. It acts as a way of relating knowledge and ignorance at the level of initial ideas. These are peculiar “game” manipulations of true and false, knowledge and non-knowledge. The rules presented in the text for formulating a scientific problem in an article for a sociological journal are universal. Knowing the rules means knowing the boundaries of creative freedom. The author claims that playing by the rules does not guarantee, but increases the likelihood that the article will be published, and their violation is not a force majeure obstacle to publication in the journal “Sociological studies”.