ArticlePerspectives on medical education2019
The utility of failure: a taxonomy for research and scholarship.
Article in Perspectives on medical education, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionHealth professions education (HPE) research and scholarship utilizes a range of methodologies, traditions, and disciplines. Many conducting scholarship in HPE may not have had the opportunity to consider the value of a well-designed but failed scholarly project, benefitted from role-modelling of the value of failure, nor have engaged with the common nature of failure in research and scholarship.
methodsDrawing on key concepts from philosophy of science, this piece describes the necessity and benefit of failure in research and scholarship, presents a taxonomy of failure relevant to HPE research, and applies this taxonomy to works published in the Perspectives on Medical Education failures/surprises series.
resultsI propose three forms of failure relevant to HPE scholarship: innovation-driven, discovery-oriented, and serendipitous failure. Innovation-driven failure was the most commonly represented type of failure in the failures/surprises section, and discovery-oriented the least common.
conclusionsConsidering failure in research and scholarship, four conclusions are drawn. First, failure is integral to research and scholarship-it is how theories are refined, discoveries are made, and innovations are developed. Second, we must purposefully engage with the opportunities that failure provide-understanding why a particular well-designed project failed is an opportunity for further insight. Third, we must engage publicly with failure in order to better communicate and role model the complexities of executing scholarship or innovating in HPE. Fourth, in order to make failure truly an opportunity for growth, we must, as a community, humanize and normalize failure as part of a productive scholarly approach.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.