Tension

Research

A productive conflict between two well-founded ideas that cannot be easily resolved; often the most analytically generative point in a literature review.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — tension merriam-webster.com accessed 23 September 2026

Merriam-Webster’s scholarly sense is 1c: “a balance maintained in an artistic work between opposing forces or elements”, alongside “inner striving, unrest, or imbalance” and the mechanical senses — “the act or action of stretching” and “either of two balancing forces causing or tending to cause extension”. From Latin tendere, to stretch or draw tight; first recorded 1533 in the mechanical sense. The physical image is the useful one: a tension in a literature is two findings pulling against each other while both hold — not simply a contradiction to be resolved away.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. The research usage above is this lexicon’s own.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).