The Most Beautiful Theories: 2006 James Flack Norris Award

Scholarship is the process by which, over 200 years, the discovery of knowledge has evolved from personal and idiosyncratic "beautiful theories" to become a system of reliable community practices that moves our understanding of the world forward. Scholarship is not a mere synonym for the research that discovers new knowledge, but it is the process by which they design and implement good research instead of bad research, and it is the lens through which they assess the documentation of research presented to them, by others, in order to evaluate it-for publishing, for funding, for elaborating, and for advocating. Here, Coppola discusses four characteristics of what it means to learn how to discover new knowledge according to the tenets of scholarship.