Conceptualizing the research cycle for the field of materials science and engineering

Abstract Early-career materials researchers often receive guidance from their individual advisors on best practices for conducting research, but the materials science community lacks an explicit model of the research process. As a result, the lived experience of an individual researcher can be quite different from their peers since they may be exposed to a different unique set of implicit research steps. In this article, we translate an existing research heuristic from other fields and make explicit the steps, methodologies, and strategies materials science engineering researchers utilize to advance our collective materials science knowledge. This newly proposed research cycle can improve the experience of both those early-career and established researchers by providing common expectations, increase the return-on-investment for research sponsors by encouraging robust planning, and increase the impact of our collective research work by encouraging knowledge development. This new research cycle for materials science and engineering clearly emphasizes that all researchers should review literature throughout a research cycle rather than just being conducted once during the initiation steps. In addition, researchers should consider incorporating engineering design principles when planning their experimental or computational research studies. Graphical abstract Impact statement Our field of materials science and engineering emerged in the 1950s, and while we have defined its focus as building knowledge about the interrelationships between material processing, structure/microstructure, properties, and performance in application, the collective community has not yet explicitly addressed what a general research cycle includes. Without an explicit, shared definition of research, it is difficult to train novice researchers. This impedes our community’s ability to establish new knowledge. We hope this article helps researchers by articulating the materials science and engineering research cycle and clarifies how this cycle is distinct from either the scientific method or the engineering design cycle. For novice researchers, this article should provide clarity on what research is and help them to more deeply engage in discovery. For experienced researchers, this article may help to initiate reflection on their own practices, thus gaining more awareness of the processes they use to construct new knowledge. Collectively, these changes could enable our community to gain deeper insights and perhaps make critical changes that result in more robust data or refined insights.