About Forms of Contribution in Research

Last updated on August 6, 2026

NOTE: This post deals with understanding various types of contributions in academic research (SECTION 1) and how to argue for your contribution (SECTION 2). This post is written especially for more junior researchers, including PhD students.

SECTION 1: Some forms of contributions in academic research:

1. Empirical contribution — these are your findings, essentially. You show something novel based on the data you collected and analyzed (e.g., “x increases y”). Empirical contributions are based on hard data and evidence, typically obtained using statistical analysis.
2. Conceptual contribution — you introduce and define a new concept (e.g., “Remora’s dilemma”), meaning you conceptualize (i.e., label, give name to) a phenomenon that you have observed. You clearly define it and delineate its boundaries (or what is known/believed about the boundaries). These are based on observation and creative thinking.
3. Methodological contribution — you introduce a new approach (e.g., algorithm, model, technique) to solve a problem or task (e.g., “zig-zag strategy for hyperparameter selection”) and show that it performs better than a baseline, which is usually a more naïve, simpler way of solving the task, or it can be a state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach which represents the best known way of solving the task. These contributions are based on testing and experiments.
4. Synthesis contribution — you summarize what is known about a topic and present gaps in our body of knowledge (this is usually a systematic literature review). A synthesis contribution is based on reading and systematically processing/coding/interpreting previous work, often both empirical and conceptual.
5. Framework or theory contribution — you try to explain a phenomenon (e.g., LLM behavior, human behavior) in a more or less generalizable way, or in the case of framework you describe a process or structure that has non-trivial degree of complexity (often done in a diagram showing relationships between different concepts). These contributions can be based on empirical findings, creative thinking, synthesis, novel concepts — basically on all other types of contributions that you leverage for a bigger “story” of how things are (or in some cases, how they could be). Creating a theory is probably the most challenging form of contribution, and I would recommend that most PhD students avoid it because it is far more easier to get confused with it than make efficient progress with it (at least compared to other forms of contribution). One could perhaps attempt progressively like this: conceptual contribution => framework contribution => theory contribution.

Should you aim for multiple contribution types in the same paper? Yes, you can have multiple contributions in one paper, though often a paper focuses on one type of contribution (it’s hard enough to argue for one!). Even if you wouldn’t make multiple types of contributions in one paper, it helps to think if there is also a conceptual contribution, for example, in addition to empirical ones. So, you could consider these five contribution types as a checklist to go through when thinking about your research paper and what it contributes.

SECTION 2: How to argue for your contributions

All contributions should to be interesting and novel. “Interesting” means people in your topical field find them interesting. “Novel” means people in your topical field didn’t already know what you presented. It can be difficult for a novice researcher to assess the novelty and interestingness of the contributions. This skill evolves over time as you get more knowledgeable of your research field. Until then, ask your professor (or AI, with due caution) to help you assess whether your paper’s contributions are interesting and novel.

It is important to position your contributions relative to previous work. How is this done? The basic formula is CCC or the ‘three Cs’: does your contribution corroborate, contradict, or complement previous literature? These three Cs work most conveniently with empirical contributions: basically, you can compare your findings to findings in earlier work and identify the differences. This can be done systematically and is not very difficult.

And is some contribution type “easier”, then? Yes, I would say so. The easiest is probably empirical contributions—as described in the previous paragraph, it only requires effort to find relevant findings and compare yours against them. If you use the CCC approach, you can tabulate previous findings and systematically compare your findings against them.

Similarly, conceptual contributions are often easier and more defensible than claiming you “create, extend, or modify” a theory. If you’re creative enough, you can observe some interesting relationships or patterns, either quantitative or qualitative, that you can give a name to (i.e., label). Then when you define that label, it becomes a conceptual contribution. Of course, sometimes the concept, even though novel, is just expressing a previously known idea in different words. So you have to be little knowledgeable of other concepts to claim that this conceptual contribution has some novelty.

Finally, I would advise steering away from over-reaching claims about how you extend this and that theory. Such claims look naïve and embarrassing. Stick to your findings, position them relative to other findings, and then you can discuss if you have some interesting theoretical propositions derived, by your own logical abstract thinking, from those positioning arguments. But the completely wrong way to approach this is “here are my findings, let me find a ‘theory’ that they somehow relate to and claim that I now extend that theory”. That’s intellectually lazy. Proper theory extension requires that the theory is part of the research process from the beginning, and you usually have *one* theory, not many that you superficially change from one part of the paper to another. Again, this is one reason why I advise against too much theoretical thinking, especially for younger scholars. Start with the easier forms of contribution.

UPDATE (Sep 2, 2024—-today, stumbled across with these seven contributions, which is a more extensive version than what I wrote above): In their 2016 paper, Wobbrock and Kienz outline seven types of contributions in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Here’s a summary of these contributions:

1. Conceptual Contributions: Introducing new ideas, theories, or frameworks that enhance understanding of HCI.
2. Empirical Contributions: Providing new data or findings through experiments, surveys, or observations that inform HCI practices.
3. Technical Contributions: Developing new tools, technologies, or systems that advance HCI methodologies or user experiences.
4. Methodological Contributions: Offering new methods or techniques for conducting research or evaluation in HCI.
5. Design Contributions: Creating novel designs or interfaces that improve user interaction or experience.
6. Theoretical Contributions: Expanding or refining existing theories within HCI through critical analysis or synthesis of past research.
7. Application Contributions: Demonstrating the practical application of HCI principles in real-world settings, showcasing the impact on users or communities.