Although there are certainly negative stereotypes associated with science, scholars in the natural sciences have historically had more status and better compensation than scholars in fields not considered to be scientific.
Consider for a moment, the images -- especially those related to status -- likely associated with the following terms or phrases:
Whether for good or ill, there has been a notable trend for scholars in a wide variety of disciplines to adopt the "scientific research model." Historians, for example, create hypothesis, gather data and use statistical software to test or reject their hypothesis about a variety of events and trends. There is some controversy about the appropriateness of wide-spread adoption of this model.
Science is about research and the definition of science is certainly similar to that of research. For example, "Science is the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena. ...Any activity that appears to require study and method [from the Latin scientia -- to know].
Other definitions look as science as "reality testing," i.e. seeing how change in one variable affects other variables.
One of the key notions of scientific research is that scientists discover generalizable relationships which allow accurate predictions. For example, we know how will happen when a certain kind of rock is exposed to a certain chemical. The goal of ALL research is to enhance predictions so that we know that a change in var1 will result in a change in var2. A brief examination of weather forecasting illustrates that scientists improve their ability to predict, but that their predictions are often not as accurate as they would like.
Does this phrase make any sense at all? How central is the conduct of research to what we do? If we were library scientists, what would we do and how would we do it?
Science grew from the efforts of ordinary people to make sense of their environment. Until quite recently, nearly all scientists were amateurs. "Science is but common sense refined and organized. A frequently used example:
Notions of cause and effect are the heart of science. Causal relationships, if tested, will allow for prediction. Prediction allows for control.
The experimental method where a treatment is given to the test group and a pretest treatment is given to the control group is a well-known way to test potential cause and effect relationships.
Explanations attempt to answer the question "why." A theory is a thoughtful, tested explanation of why something happens. A theory is not a guess. Instead, it is an explanation that works reliably when applied to available evidence. Theories must be plausible and useful. Plausible means that the theory does not conflict with observations of reality. Useful means that it predicts what actually happens. When someone says that "something is good in theory, but not in practice," they misunderstand the fundamental nature of the theory. Something that does not work in the real world cannot be a theory.
The more powerful the theory, the more events that can be explained by it. A generalization is a statement of a relationship between two or more events that can be used for prediction. Broader generalizations become theories. All explanations may be arranged on planes of generality from the more general to the more particular. A law is the most powerful level of theory.
Curiously, in the scientific method, one attempts to test theories by attempting to refute them via rejecting hypotheses not supported by the evidence.
Science is concerned with "truth." Here something is true IF:
That something is true does not mean that most believe it to be. For quite a long time, nearly everyone believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Popular beliefs are often untrue.
Theories, as they become stronger and stronger in their predictive power, allow phenomena to be controlled. For example, if we know what causes a disease we are likely to begin the steps to control it. For example, if mutilation of library materials is the result of inadequate and too expensive photo duplication, we can reduce mutilation by improving the quality and access to photo duplication while reducing its cost.
Since causation is usually the result of several variables, control tends to be more difficult than first thought.
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