Without exhibiting any value judgement, I will say that you are factually incorrect. The work of a musicologist towards finding influences of French music in that of Shostacocitch is very much research. It differs from finding all spinor representations of some group only in the substance of the goal. The empirical side of it is also of the same kind: I do not find visiting archives and working with the original documents much different from lab work in physics (both are equally boring for me --- but that's irrelevant).
Further, all of the present-day physics, where work in finding the truth you undoubtedly call research, is based in part on the Least Action Prinicple: a certain intergral of a function (the Lagrangian density of the action, usually referred to as simply Lagrangian) is minimized. The classical physics, the relativistic correction, and the quantum picture all modify the Lagrangian but continue to adhere to the Principle, do they not? When you go further to field theory, the Lagrangian is written anew, but the Principle remains.
How is that different from economics? Here a person or a group thereof, referred to as decision-maker, maximizes an integral of a Lagrangian, which is called the (von Neuman-Morgenstern) utility function. It is equally hard to find the solution of the latter problem and equally informative to interpret it. In fact, you might find it suprising that the latter problem is harder than in physics for two reasons: (i) a human decision-maker can chose a multiply connected space, whereas G-d has chosen our physical space to be simply connected, and (ii) there are multiple decision-makers in many cases (such as compensation of CEOs, much discussed on FR lately), and several action integrals must be optimized simultanously. How is the foregoing more intellectuall shallow than physics? Or than establishing a metrizability of a certain topology in mathematics?
Perhaps, it is the lack of your familiarity with the fields outside of "hard sciences" that leads you to the false conclusion. It is for you to determine the reason, but your statement is factually incorrect.
Or Shostakovich, even? Or perhaps there's a similarly named composer I haven't heard of?
Regardless, I think you are about 50 years out of date on the topic of what constitutes scholarship in the humanities.
Here are the recent scholarly publications of a colleague of mine from the English Department
Audre Lorde's Zami: A Portrait of the Artist as a Black Lesbian
Being an I-Witness: My Life as a Lesbian Teacher
Teaching What I'm Not: An Able-Bodied Woman Teaches Literature by Women with Disabilities
Crossing the Road, or, What's a Nice Lesbian Feminist Like You Doing in a Place Like This?
No. I don't call this research. I don't even call it scholarship.
Irrelevant blather about Lagrangians deleted. Don't try to snow me, buddy.
Perhaps, it is the lack of your familiarity with the fields outside of "hard sciences" that leads you to the false conclusion.
Nope.