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Hi.I am new to this, so here I go:
I am a graduate student studying sociology. I am currently taking a research methods course and have an assignment that is leaving me with many unanswered questions (of which my professor will not help). So, if anyone can guide me, I'd really appreciate it. The question: What makes scientific research go? In other words, what makes up and drives the research market?
I'd love both your thoughts and maybe some relevent articles/pieces on the subject. Thank you!

prepare to be insulted by "Uncle Al"...

Well, if I must take insult to get to my goal...then bring it on...

There is no single answer. Each of us is driven my something different.

For some it is the promise of recognition. A patent, a paper published, a book.

For some it is the challenge of facing down a challenge never before bested and tenaciously wrestling it into submission.

For some is just a 9-to-5 job and they can't wait to get home and work in the garden.

And I could give you a dozen more equally valid answers if I were writting the paper.

Takes all kinds to make the world go round.

I know, speaking for myself, the papers I published were both private and public. The private ones were driven partially by pure love of learning and partially by the fact that my employer wanted certain research conducted for submission to the FDA. In the case of the public papers effort was put into finding something no one had ever done before and then doing it. It was, again, the intellectual challenge.

My suspicion, since I teach at the University of Washington is that your professor is not looking for one answer ... but rather for you to be doing research. Hit the campus library. Hit google. There are published studies. This is an area where grad student have frequently tread. And do not forget the Citation Index.

Passion (and genius and accumulated knowledge, for the dirty 10% reduction to practice. Ethics are recommended, morals are irrelevant).

You'll hear a wanna-be whine and flutter, denigrating those who successfully put the rubber to the road. Such "achievement" is measured by smoke, not by fire.

Consider a career of arriving each morning to a blank chalkboard and having something new and important upon it by end of day. (Whiteboards are for posseurs. Their markers dry out while real people are thinking.) Do that 200 times/year for your whole professional life. Think of it as evolution in action.

When you need an answer in the worst way possible - Uncle Al's way.

(Sociology is not tightly coupled to objective reality. If you find yourself shouting "ANOVA!"... ISBN 0691122946.)

There are many factors:

1) Hard work. You will never get anywhere without it. Even if you are in the top 0.1% of the population, there are a ton of equally smart people out there. Inspiration comes to people who are intimately aquanted with a subject. And that comes with...Hard work! If you are impressed with your test scores, keep in mind that few other people are. Accomplishing something good is worth more than having the potential to accomlish something great.

You also have to admit to yourself from the start that it is going to be a long hard job. This is especially true for grad school. After 2 or 3 years, you think you are half way through. Many grad students spend about 2/3 of the time thinking they are "half way through". You have to believe that you can work though it. It is very depressing to have 3 or 4 years of grad school and then flame out without your degree.

2) Intelligence. Absolutely necessary. When you make a discovery, you have to know it. You don't want to just put results out into the world and say, "Look, my data does this wacky thing" and hope that someone smart explains it to you (and somehow magically gives you the credit).

You also have to know when you start out on a project that it will get somewhere. You don't want to go down some research path for 5 or 6 years, tell the world your results only to have someone tell you how it was obvious (and/or uninteresting) from the beginning. This is less important in grad school, where the advisor should be guiding the research at the beginning.

3) the ability to admit your mistakes. When you have spent a lot of time on a no-where project, you have to know it's better to start something new than keep banging away on the same no-where project.

4) The ability to work with others. You can't do it all alone. If you find that everyone around you is an idiot, it is time to look in a mirror for the problem. If you find yourself badmouthing old collaborators, you will find it hard to find new ones.

This is not to say that you should get others to do all the work. Some people think of themselves as "the idea guy", organizing other people to use their skills to get the job done. They are managers, not researchers.

5) Humility. At some point, you will likely consider your advisor to be a complete idiot. You will realize that you know much more about the subject that (s)he does. Later you realize how much help the advisor was.

6) Confidence. While it seems contradictory to (5), you have to know and believe that you are one of the few people in the world (if not the only one) who knows what you know.

7) A sense of humor about yourself. I remember seeing a really odd effect in a measurement. My advisor told me "this is big, really big". The next day, he stopped by the lab to tell me, "Yes, this would have won us the nobel prize...had we discovered it 80 years ago." And then proceeded to explain it to me. If you take yourself too seriously and constantly trying to make yourself look smart, you will be destined for disapointment.

8) Luck. Yep, sometimes it just comes down to luck. Of course, luck comes to those who do hard work!

Thanks so much for you time, effort, thoughts and guidance; I very much appreciate it. Best of luck to you all!

J. Arthur, with respect to number 7:

That brings back so many memories. Most of what I remember from my 20s, so much that seems wonderful, unique, creative, challenging, in the cold light of ChemAbs became ... old news.

I remember thinking that just finding something never done before might take years of research. Luckily though I had my own GC/MassSpec and Dr. Carl Djerassi.

For anyone interested in learning about two very fascinating people ... look up Carl and his research partner Dr. Alejandro Zaffaroni. Both geniuses by any definition.

I should have added:

9) the ability to communicate clearly. There is no point working on something for years only to put it into an obtuse paper or web-page. The point of a paper isn't to impress others with your command of the language, but to dommunicate your findings. Likewise, assume that the reader can get by with a minimum of background. Use enough to put the paper in context, but trust your references.

If you want to try to hide the fact that you don't really know what you are doing, you can fool some people with an overly long paper. But, long term, you need good results presented well. "Well" usually means "briefly". If you take 10 words to say what you could have said in 5, at best all you have done is wasted your reader's time. At worst, you will have confused the point.

Similar to this point is some good advice passed down from an old prof. When you give the paper in a talk--"You will never do anything interesting enough to go over your time limit".

Respect your audience.