At the undergraduate level, the center of attention is on the theoretical and practical education of students. Through the advancement of theoretical and specialized knowledge alongside applied exercises, students improve their practical competencies and operational abilities, discover and reveal their professional aptitudes, and work toward developing them. At this stage, research in the sense of expanding the boundaries of knowledge and understanding does not occupy a central place; rather, the student looks for to deepen internalized insights and to develop the capacity to apply them in practical contexts.
At the graduate level — particularly at the master’s degree stage — students, having acquired foundational professional skills, grow toward deepening and broadening their knowledge. This expansion of disciplinary boundaries necessarily entails inquiry and research. Research, in accordance with three essential foundations — precise observation, appropriate analysis and interpretation, and coherent presentation — contributes to the deepening of knowledge. Among the most suitable formats for such scholarly work are review articles, which, by reflecting on the past and critically engaging with prior literature, open new pathways toward the future and toward emerging knowledge. In such articles, the researcher situates him/herself in alignment with current data and information, offering a clear and illuminating account of knowledge and understanding within a specific sphere.
In the doctoral level, the researcher steps beyond the existing frontiers of knowledge and, by transcending established frameworks, grounds a new idea/notion in the zone of dialogue with other perspectives. This idea drives the research forward, endows data and information with meaning, and gives rise to new experiments and interpretations aimed at testing and consolidating that underlying idea. Moving beyond the mere accumulation of information and knowledge to arrive at a foundational or insight-generating idea constitutes the essence of “original” research — a place where the researcher, drawing on their own idea, advances the boundaries of knowledge and attains a genuinely new insight.
The Journal of Architectural and Environmental Research, in pursuit of its mission to advance research in the fields of architecture, environment, and place, strives to support researchers and authors in channeling their capacities toward the attainment of this epistemological horizon and scientific insight — as the Great Poet Hafez aptly reflects: “Whatever meets with acceptance, and whatever is deemed worthy of regard.”

Mohammad Sadegh Falahat