Studies of Scientific Discovery: Complementary Approaches and Convergent Findings

This review integrates 4 major approaches to the study of science—historical accounts of scientific discoveries, psychological experiments with nonscientists working on tasks related to scientific discoveries, direct observation of ongoing scientific laboratories, and computational modeling of scientific discovery processes—by viewing them through the lens of the theory of human problem solving. The authors provide a brief justification for the study of scientific discovery, a summary of the major approaches, and criteria for comparing and contrasting them. Then, they apply these criteria to the different approaches and indicate their complementarities. Finally, they provide several examples of convergent principles of the process of scientific discovery.