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What Are Research Objectives and How to Write Them (with Examples)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Research is at the center of everything researchers do, and setting clear, well-defined research objectives plays a pivotal role in guiding scholars toward their desired outcomes. Research papers are essential instruments for researchers to effectively communicate their work. Among the many sections that constitute a research paper, the introduction plays a key role in providing a background and setting the context. 1 Research objectives, which define the aims of the study, are usually stated in the introduction. Every study has a research question that the authors are trying to answer, and the objective is an active statement about how the study will answer this research question. These objectives help guide the development and design of the study and steer the research in the appropriate direction; if this is not clearly defined, a project can fail!

Research studies have a research question, research hypothesis, and one or more research objectives. A research question is what a study aims to answer, and a research hypothesis is a predictive statement about the relationship between two or more variables, which the study sets out to prove or disprove. Objectives are specific, measurable goals that the study aims to achieve. The difference between these three is illustrated by the following example:

• Research question : How does low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) compare with a placebo device in managing the symptoms of skeletally mature patients with patellar tendinopathy?
• Research hypothesis : Pain levels are reduced in patients who receive daily active-LIPUS (treatment) for 12 weeks compared with individuals who receive inactive-LIPUS (placebo).
• Research objective : To investigate the clinical efficacy of LIPUS in the management of patellar tendinopathy symptoms.

This article discusses the importance of clear, well-thought out objectives and suggests methods to write them clearly.

What is the introduction in research papers?

Research objectives are usually included in the introduction section. This section is the first that the readers will read so it is essential that it conveys the subject matter appropriately and is well written to create a good first impression. A good introduction sets the tone of the paper and clearly outlines the contents so that the readers get a quick snapshot of what to expect.

A good introduction should aim to: 2,3

• Indicate the main subject area, its importance, and cite previous literature on the subject
• Define the gap(s) in existing research, ask a research question, and state the objectives
• Announce the present research and outline its novelty and significance
• Avoid repeating the Abstract, providing unnecessary information, and claiming novelty without accurate supporting information.

Why are research objectives important?

Objectives can help you stay focused and steer your research in the required direction. They help define and limit the scope of your research, which is important to efficiently manage your resources and time. The objectives help to create and maintain the overall structure, and specify two main things—the variables and the methods of quantifying the variables.

A good research objective:

• defines the scope of the study
• gives direction to the research
• helps maintain focus and avoid diversions from the topic
• minimizes wastage of resources like time, money, and energy

Types of research objectives

Research objectives can be broadly classified into general and specific objectives . 4 General objectives state what the research expects to achieve overall while specific objectives break this down into smaller, logically connected parts, each of which addresses various parts of the research problem. General objectives are the main goals of the study and are usually fewer in number while specific objectives are more in number because they address several aspects of the research problem.

Example (general objective): To investigate the factors influencing the financial performance of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange market.

Example (specific objective): To assess the influence of firm size on the financial performance of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange market.

In addition to this broad classification, research objectives can be grouped into several categories depending on the research problem, as given in Table 1.

Table 1: Types of research objectives

Characteristics of research objectives

Research objectives must start with the word “To” because this helps readers identify the objective in the absence of headings and appropriate sectioning in research papers. 5,6

• A good objective is SMART (mostly applicable to specific objectives):
• Specific—clear about the what, why, when, and how
• Measurable—identifies the main variables of the study and quantifies the targets
• Achievable—attainable using the available time and resources
• Realistic—accurately addresses the scope of the problem
• Time-bound—identifies the time in which each step will be completed
• Research objectives clarify the purpose of research.
• They help understand the relationship and dissimilarities between variables.
• They provide a direction that helps the research to reach a definite conclusion.

How to write research objectives?

Research objectives can be written using the following steps: 7

• State your main research question clearly and concisely.
• Describe the ultimate goal of your study, which is similar to the research question but states the intended outcomes more definitively.
• Divide this main goal into subcategories to develop your objectives.
• Limit the number of objectives (1-2 general; 3-4 specific)
• Assess each objective using the SMART
• Start each objective with an action verb like assess, compare, determine, evaluate, etc., which makes the research appear more actionable.
• Use specific language without making the sentence data heavy.
• The most common section to add the objectives is the introduction and after the problem statement.
• Add the objectives to the abstract (if there is one).
• State the general objective first, followed by the specific objectives.

Formulating research objectives

Formulating research objectives has the following five steps, which could help researchers develop a clear objective: 8

• Identify the research problem.
• Review past studies on subjects similar to your problem statement, that is, studies that use similar methods, variables, etc.
• Identify the research gaps the current study should cover based on your literature review. These gaps could be theoretical, methodological, or conceptual.
• Define the research question(s) based on the gaps identified.
• Revise/relate the research problem based on the defined research question and the gaps identified. This is to confirm that there is an actual need for a study on the subject based on the gaps in literature.
• Identify and write the general and specific objectives.
• Incorporate the objectives into the study.

Advantages of research objectives

Adding clear research objectives has the following advantages: 4,8

• Maintains the focus and direction of the research
• Optimizes allocation of resources with minimal wastage
• Acts as a foundation for defining appropriate research questions and hypotheses
• Provides measurable outcomes that can help evaluate the success of the research
• Determines the feasibility of the research by helping to assess the availability of required resources
• Ensures relevance of the study to the subject and its contribution to existing literature

Disadvantages of research objectives

Research objectives also have few disadvantages, as listed below: 8

• Absence of clearly defined objectives can lead to ambiguity in the research process
• Unintentional bias could affect the validity and accuracy of the research findings

Key takeaways

• Research objectives are concise statements that describe what the research is aiming to achieve.
• They define the scope and direction of the research and maintain focus.
• The objectives should be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
• Clear research objectives help avoid collection of data or resources not required for the study.
• Well-formulated specific objectives help develop the overall research methodology, including data collection, analysis, interpretation, and utilization.
• Research objectives should cover all aspects of the problem statement in a coherent way.
• They should be clearly stated using action verbs.

Frequently asked questions on research objectives

Q: what’s the difference between research objectives and aims 9.

A: Research aims are statements that reflect the broad goal(s) of the study and outline the general direction of the research. They are not specific but clearly define the focus of the study.

Example: This research aims to explore employee experiences of digital transformation in retail HR.

Research objectives focus on the action to be taken to achieve the aims. They make the aims more practical and should be specific and actionable.

Example: To observe the retail HR employees throughout the digital transformation.

Q: What are the examples of research objectives, both general and specific?

A: Here are a few examples of research objectives:

• To identify the antiviral chemical constituents in Mumbukura gitoniensis (general)
• To carry out solvent extraction of dried flowers of Mumbukura gitoniensis and isolate the constituents. (specific)
• To determine the antiviral activity of each of the isolated compounds. (specific)
• To examine the extent, range, and method of coral reef rehabilitation projects in five shallow reef areas adjacent to popular tourist destinations in the Philippines.
• To investigate species richness of mammal communities in five protected areas over the past 20 years.
• To evaluate the potential application of AI techniques for estimating best-corrected visual acuity from fundus photographs with and without ancillary information.
• To investigate whether sport influences psychological parameters in the personality of asthmatic children.

Q: How do I develop research objectives?

A: Developing research objectives begins with defining the problem statement clearly, as illustrated by Figure 1. Objectives specify how the research question will be answered and they determine what is to be measured to test the hypothesis.

Q: Are research objectives measurable?

A: The word “measurable” implies that something is quantifiable. In terms of research objectives, this means that the source and method of collecting data are identified and that all these aspects are feasible for the research. Some metrics can be created to measure your progress toward achieving your objectives.

Q: Can research objectives change during the study?

A: Revising research objectives during the study is acceptable in situations when the selected methodology is not progressing toward achieving the objective, or if there are challenges pertaining to resources, etc. One thing to keep in mind is the time and resources you would have to complete your research after revising the objectives. Thus, as long as your problem statement and hypotheses are unchanged, minor revisions to the research objectives are acceptable.

Q: What is the difference between research questions and research objectives? 10

Q: Are research objectives the same as hypotheses?

A: No, hypotheses are predictive theories that are expressed in general terms. Research objectives, which are more specific, are developed from hypotheses and aim to test them. A hypothesis can be tested using several methods and each method will have different objectives because the methodology to be used could be different. A hypothesis is developed based on observation and reasoning; it is a calculated prediction about why a particular phenomenon is occurring. To test this prediction, different research objectives are formulated. Here’s a simple example of both a research hypothesis and research objective.

Research hypothesis : Employees who arrive at work earlier are more productive.

Research objective : To assess whether employees who arrive at work earlier are more productive.

To summarize, research objectives are an important part of research studies and should be written clearly to effectively communicate your research. We hope this article has given you a brief insight into the importance of using clearly defined research objectives and how to formulate them.

• Farrugia P, Petrisor BA, Farrokhyar F, Bhandari M. Practical tips for surgical research: Research questions, hypotheses and objectives. Can J Surg. 2010 Aug;53(4):278-81.
• Abbadia J. How to write an introduction for a research paper. Mind the Graph website. Accessed June 14, 2023. https://mindthegraph.com/blog/how-to-write-an-introduction-for-a-research-paper/
• Writing a scientific paper: Introduction. UCI libraries website. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://guides.lib.uci.edu/c.php?g=334338&p=2249903
• Research objectives—Types, examples and writing guide. Researchmethod.net website. Accessed June 17, 2023. https://researchmethod.net/research-objectives/#:~:text=They%20provide%20a%20clear%20direction,track%20and%20achieve%20their%20goals .
• Bartle P. SMART Characteristics of good objectives. Community empowerment collective website. Accessed June 16, 2023. https://cec.vcn.bc.ca/cmp/modules/pd-smar.htm
• Research objectives. Studyprobe website. Accessed June 18, 2023. https://www.studyprobe.in/2022/08/research-objectives.html
• Corredor F. How to write objectives in a research paper. wikiHow website. Accessed June 18, 2023. https://www.wikihow.com/Write-Objectives-in-a-Research-Proposal
• Research objectives: Definition, types, characteristics, advantages. AccountingNest website. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://www.accountingnest.com/articles/research/research-objectives
• Phair D., Shaeffer A. Research aims, objectives & questions. GradCoach website. Accessed June 20, 2023. https://gradcoach.com/research-aims-objectives-questions/
• Understanding the difference between research questions and objectives. Accessed June 21, 2023. https://board.researchersjob.com/blog/research-questions-and-objectives

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Research objectives refer to the definitive statements made by researchers at the beginning of a research project detailing exactly what a research project aims to achieve.

These objectives are explicit goals clearly and concisely projected by the researcher to present a clear intention or course of action for his or her qualitative or quantitative study. 

Research objectives are typically nested under one overarching research aim. The objectives are the steps you’ll need to take in order to achieve the aim (see the examples below, for example, which demonstrate an aim followed by 3 objectives, which is what I recommend to my research students).

Research Objectives vs Research Aims

Research aim and research objectives are fundamental constituents of any study, fitting together like two pieces of the same puzzle.

The ‘research aim’ describes the overarching goal or purpose of the study (Kumar, 2019). This is usually a broad, high-level purpose statement, summing up the central question that the research intends to answer.

Example of an Overarching Research Aim:

“The aim of this study is to explore the impact of climate change on crop productivity.” 

Comparatively, ‘research objectives’ are concrete goals that underpin the research aim, providing stepwise actions to achieve the aim.

Objectives break the primary aim into manageable, focused pieces, and are usually characterized as being more specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Examples of Specific Research Objectives:

1. “To examine the effects of rising temperatures on the yield of rice crops during the upcoming growth season.” 2. “To assess changes in rainfall patterns in major agricultural regions over the first decade of the twenty-first century (2000-2010).” 3. “To analyze the impact of changing weather patterns on crop diseases within the same timeframe.”

The distinction between these two terms, though subtle, is significant for successfully conducting a study. The research aim provides the study with direction, while the research objectives set the path to achieving this aim, thereby ensuring the study’s efficiency and effectiveness.

How to Write Research Objectives

I usually recommend to my students that they use the SMART framework to create their research objectives.

SMART is an acronym standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. It provides a clear method of defining solid research objectives and helps students know where to start in writing their objectives (Locke & Latham, 2013).

Each element of this acronym adds a distinct dimension to the framework, aiding in the creation of comprehensive, well-delineated objectives.

Here is each step:

• Specific : We need to avoid ambiguity in our objectives. They need to be clear and precise (Doran, 1981). For instance, rather than stating the objective as “to study the effects of social media,” a more focused detail would be “to examine the effects of social media use (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) on the academic performance of college students.”
• Measurable: The measurable attribute provides a clear criterion to determine if the objective has been met (Locke & Latham, 2013). A quantifiable element, such as a percentage or a number, adds a measurable quality. For example, “to increase response rate to the annual customer survey by 10%,” makes it easier to ascertain achievement.
• Achievable: The achievable aspect encourages researchers to craft realistic objectives, resembling a self-check mechanism to ensure the objectives align with the scope and resources at disposal (Doran, 1981). For example, “to interview 25 participants selected randomly from a population of 100” is an attainable objective as long as the researcher has access to these participants.
• Relevance : Relevance, the fourth element, compels the researcher to tailor the objectives in alignment with overarching goals of the study (Locke & Latham, 2013). This is extremely important – each objective must help you meet your overall one-sentence ‘aim’ in your study.
• Time-Bound: Lastly, the time-bound element fosters a sense of urgency and prioritization, preventing procrastination and enhancing productivity (Doran, 1981). “To analyze the effect of laptop use in lectures on student engagement over the course of two semesters this year” expresses a clear deadline, thus serving as a motivator for timely completion.

You’re not expected to fit every single element of the SMART framework in one objective, but across your objectives, try to touch on each of the five components.

Research Objectives Examples

1. Field: Psychology

Aim: To explore the impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance in college students.

• Objective 1: To compare cognitive test scores of students with less than six hours of sleep and those with 8 or more hours of sleep.
• Objective 2: To investigate the relationship between class grades and reported sleep duration.
• Objective 3: To survey student perceptions and experiences on how sleep deprivation affects their cognitive capabilities.

2. Field: Environmental Science

Aim: To understand the effects of urban green spaces on human well-being in a metropolitan city.

• Objective 1: To assess the physical and mental health benefits of regular exposure to urban green spaces.
• Objective 2: To evaluate the social impacts of urban green spaces on community interactions.
• Objective 3: To examine patterns of use for different types of urban green spaces. 

3. Field: Technology

Aim: To investigate the influence of using social media on productivity in the workplace.

• Objective 1: To measure the amount of time spent on social media during work hours.
• Objective 2: To evaluate the perceived impact of social media use on task completion and work efficiency.
• Objective 3: To explore whether company policies on social media usage correlate with different patterns of productivity.

4. Field: Education

Aim: To examine the effectiveness of online vs traditional face-to-face learning on student engagement and achievement.

• Objective 1: To compare student grades between the groups exposed to online and traditional face-to-face learning.
• Objective 2: To assess student engagement levels in both learning environments.
• Objective 3: To collate student perceptions and preferences regarding both learning methods.

5. Field: Health

Aim: To determine the impact of a Mediterranean diet on cardiac health among adults over 50.

• Objective 1: To assess changes in cardiovascular health metrics after following a Mediterranean diet for six months.
• Objective 2: To compare these health metrics with a similar group who follow their regular diet.
• Objective 3: To document participants’ experiences and adherence to the Mediterranean diet.

6. Field: Environmental Science

Aim: To analyze the impact of urban farming on community sustainability.

• Objective 1: To document the types and quantity of food produced through urban farming initiatives.
• Objective 2: To assess the effect of urban farming on local communities’ access to fresh produce.
• Objective 3: To examine the social dynamics and cooperative relationships in the creating and maintaining of urban farms.

7. Field: Sociology

Aim: To investigate the influence of home offices on work-life balance during remote work.

• Objective 1: To survey remote workers on their perceptions of work-life balance since setting up home offices.
• Objective 2: To conduct an observational study of daily work routines and family interactions in a home office setting.
• Objective 3: To assess the correlation, if any, between physical boundaries of workspaces and mental boundaries for work in the home setting.

8. Field: Economics

Aim: To evaluate the effects of minimum wage increases on small businesses.

• Objective 1: To analyze cost structures, pricing changes, and profitability of small businesses before and after minimum wage increases.
• Objective 2: To survey small business owners on the strategies they employ to navigate minimum wage increases.
• Objective 3: To examine employment trends in small businesses in response to wage increase legislation.

9. Field: Education

Aim: To explore the role of extracurricular activities in promoting soft skills among high school students.

• Objective 1: To assess the variety of soft skills developed through different types of extracurricular activities.
• Objective 2: To compare self-reported soft skills between students who participate in extracurricular activities and those who do not.
• Objective 3: To investigate the teachers’ perspectives on the contribution of extracurricular activities to students’ skill development.

10. Field: Technology

Aim: To assess the impact of virtual reality (VR) technology on the tourism industry.

• Objective 1: To document the types and popularity of VR experiences available in the tourism market.
• Objective 2: To survey tourists on their interest levels and satisfaction rates with VR tourism experiences.
• Objective 3: To determine whether VR tourism experiences correlate with increased interest in real-life travel to the simulated destinations.

11. Field: Biochemistry

Aim: To examine the role of antioxidants in preventing cellular damage.

• Objective 1: To identify the types and quantities of antioxidants in common fruits and vegetables.
• Objective 2: To determine the effects of various antioxidants on free radical neutralization in controlled lab tests.
• Objective 3: To investigate potential beneficial impacts of antioxidant-rich diets on long-term cellular health.

12. Field: Linguistics

Aim: To determine the influence of early exposure to multiple languages on cognitive development in children.

• Objective 1: To assess cognitive development milestones in monolingual and multilingual children.
• Objective 2: To document the number and intensity of language exposures for each group in the study.
• Objective 3: To investigate the specific cognitive advantages, if any, enjoyed by multilingual children.

13. Field: Art History

Aim: To explore the impact of the Renaissance period on modern-day art trends.

• Objective 1: To identify key characteristics and styles of Renaissance art.
• Objective 2: To analyze modern art pieces for the influence of the Renaissance style.
• Objective 3: To survey modern-day artists for their inspirations and the influence of historical art movements on their work.

14. Field: Cybersecurity

Aim: To assess the effectiveness of two-factor authentication (2FA) in preventing unauthorized system access.

• Objective 1: To measure the frequency of unauthorized access attempts before and after the introduction of 2FA.
• Objective 2: To survey users about their experiences and challenges with 2FA implementation.
• Objective 3: To evaluate the efficacy of different types of 2FA (SMS-based, authenticator apps, biometrics, etc.).

15. Field: Cultural Studies

Aim: To analyze the role of music in cultural identity formation among ethnic minorities.

• Objective 1: To document the types and frequency of traditional music practices within selected ethnic minority communities.
• Objective 2: To survey community members on the role of music in their personal and communal identity.
• Objective 3: To explore the resilience and transmission of traditional music practices in contemporary society.

16. Field: Astronomy

Aim: To explore the impact of solar activity on satellite communication.

• Objective 1: To categorize different types of solar activities and their frequencies of occurrence.
• Objective 2: To ascertain how variations in solar activity may influence satellite communication.
• Objective 3: To investigate preventative and damage-control measures currently in place during periods of high solar activity.

17. Field: Literature

Aim: To examine narrative techniques in contemporary graphic novels.

• Objective 1: To identify a range of narrative techniques employed in this genre.
• Objective 2: To analyze the ways in which these narrative techniques engage readers and affect story interpretation.
• Objective 3: To compare narrative techniques in graphic novels to those found in traditional printed novels.

18. Field: Renewable Energy

Aim: To investigate the feasibility of solar energy as a primary renewable resource within urban areas.

• Objective 1: To quantify the average sunlight hours across urban areas in different climatic zones. 
• Objective 2: To calculate the potential solar energy that could be harnessed within these areas.
• Objective 3: To identify barriers or challenges to widespread solar energy implementation in urban settings and potential solutions.

19. Field: Sports Science

Aim: To evaluate the role of pre-game rituals in athlete performance.

• Objective 1: To identify the variety and frequency of pre-game rituals among professional athletes in several sports.
• Objective 2: To measure the impact of pre-game rituals on individual athletes’ performance metrics.
• Objective 3: To examine the psychological mechanisms that might explain the effects (if any) of pre-game ritual on performance.

20. Field: Ecology

Aim: To investigate the effects of urban noise pollution on bird populations.

• Objective 1: To record and quantify urban noise levels in various bird habitats.
• Objective 2: To measure bird population densities in relation to noise levels.
• Objective 3: To determine any changes in bird behavior or vocalization linked to noise levels.

21. Field: Food Science

Aim: To examine the influence of cooking methods on the nutritional value of vegetables.

• Objective 1: To identify the nutrient content of various vegetables both raw and after different cooking processes.
• Objective 2: To compare the effect of various cooking methods on the nutrient retention of these vegetables.
• Objective 3: To propose cooking strategies that optimize nutrient retention.

The Importance of Research Objectives

The importance of research objectives cannot be overstated. In essence, these guideposts articulate what the researcher aims to discover, understand, or examine (Kothari, 2014).

When drafting research objectives, it’s essential to make them simple and comprehensible, specific to the point of being quantifiable where possible, achievable in a practical sense, relevant to the chosen research question, and time-constrained to ensure efficient progress (Kumar, 2019). 

Remember that a good research objective is integral to the success of your project, offering a clear path forward for setting out a research design , and serving as the bedrock of your study plan. Each objective must distinctly address a different dimension of your research question or problem (Kothari, 2014). Always bear in mind that the ultimate purpose of your research objectives is to succinctly encapsulate your aims in the clearest way possible, facilitating a coherent, comprehensive and rational approach to your planned study, and furnishing a scientific roadmap for your journey into the depths of knowledge and research (Kumar, 2019). 

Kothari, C.R (2014). Research Methodology: Methods and Techniques . New Delhi: New Age International.

Kumar, R. (2019). Research Methodology: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners .New York: SAGE Publications.

Doran, G. T. (1981). There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives. Management review, 70 (11), 35-36.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2013). New Developments in Goal Setting and Task Performance . New York: Routledge.

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Research Aims, Objectives & Questions

The “Golden Thread” Explained Simply (+ Examples)

By: David Phair (PhD) and Alexandra Shaeffer (PhD) | June 2022

The research aims , objectives and research questions (collectively called the “golden thread”) are arguably the most important thing you need to get right when you’re crafting a research proposal , dissertation or thesis . We receive questions almost every day about this “holy trinity” of research and there’s certainly a lot of confusion out there, so we’ve crafted this post to help you navigate your way through the fog.

Overview: The Golden Thread

• What is the golden thread
• What are research aims ( examples )
• What are research objectives ( examples )
• What are research questions ( examples )
• The importance of alignment in the golden thread

What is the “golden thread”?  

The golden thread simply refers to the collective research aims , research objectives , and research questions for any given project (i.e., a dissertation, thesis, or research paper ). These three elements are bundled together because it’s extremely important that they align with each other, and that the entire research project aligns with them.

Importantly, the golden thread needs to weave its way through the entirety of any research project , from start to end. In other words, it needs to be very clearly defined right at the beginning of the project (the topic ideation and proposal stage) and it needs to inform almost every decision throughout the rest of the project. For example, your research design and methodology will be heavily influenced by the golden thread (we’ll explain this in more detail later), as well as your literature review.

The research aims, objectives and research questions (the golden thread) define the focus and scope ( the delimitations ) of your research project. In other words, they help ringfence your dissertation or thesis to a relatively narrow domain, so that you can “go deep” and really dig into a specific problem or opportunity. They also help keep you on track , as they act as a litmus test for relevance. In other words, if you’re ever unsure whether to include something in your document, simply ask yourself the question, “does this contribute toward my research aims, objectives or questions?”. If it doesn’t, chances are you can drop it.

Alright, enough of the fluffy, conceptual stuff. Let’s get down to business and look at what exactly the research aims, objectives and questions are and outline a few examples to bring these concepts to life.

Research Aims: What are they?

Simply put, the research aim(s) is a statement that reflects the broad overarching goal (s) of the research project. Research aims are fairly high-level (low resolution) as they outline the general direction of the research and what it’s trying to achieve .

Research Aims: Examples  

True to the name, research aims usually start with the wording “this research aims to…”, “this research seeks to…”, and so on. For example:

“This research aims to explore employee experiences of digital transformation in retail HR.”   “This study sets out to assess the interaction between student support and self-care on well-being in engineering graduate students”  

As you can see, these research aims provide a high-level description of what the study is about and what it seeks to achieve. They’re not hyper-specific or action-oriented, but they’re clear about what the study’s focus is and what is being investigated.

Need a helping hand?

Research Objectives: What are they?

The research objectives take the research aims and make them more practical and actionable . In other words, the research objectives showcase the steps that the researcher will take to achieve the research aims.

The research objectives need to be far more specific (higher resolution) and actionable than the research aims. In fact, it’s always a good idea to craft your research objectives using the “SMART” criteria. In other words, they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound”.

Research Objectives: Examples  

Let’s look at two examples of research objectives. We’ll stick with the topic and research aims we mentioned previously.  

For the digital transformation topic:

To observe the retail HR employees throughout the digital transformation. To assess employee perceptions of digital transformation in retail HR. To identify the barriers and facilitators of digital transformation in retail HR.

And for the student wellness topic:

To determine whether student self-care predicts the well-being score of engineering graduate students. To determine whether student support predicts the well-being score of engineering students. To assess the interaction between student self-care and student support when predicting well-being in engineering graduate students.

  As you can see, these research objectives clearly align with the previously mentioned research aims and effectively translate the low-resolution aims into (comparatively) higher-resolution objectives and action points . They give the research project a clear focus and present something that resembles a research-based “to-do” list.

Research Questions: What are they?

Finally, we arrive at the all-important research questions. The research questions are, as the name suggests, the key questions that your study will seek to answer . Simply put, they are the core purpose of your dissertation, thesis, or research project. You’ll present them at the beginning of your document (either in the introduction chapter or literature review chapter) and you’ll answer them at the end of your document (typically in the discussion and conclusion chapters).  

The research questions will be the driving force throughout the research process. For example, in the literature review chapter, you’ll assess the relevance of any given resource based on whether it helps you move towards answering your research questions. Similarly, your methodology and research design will be heavily influenced by the nature of your research questions. For instance, research questions that are exploratory in nature will usually make use of a qualitative approach, whereas questions that relate to measurement or relationship testing will make use of a quantitative approach.  

Let’s look at some examples of research questions to make this more tangible.

Research Questions: Examples  

Again, we’ll stick with the research aims and research objectives we mentioned previously.  

For the digital transformation topic (which would be qualitative in nature):

How do employees perceive digital transformation in retail HR? What are the barriers and facilitators of digital transformation in retail HR?  

And for the student wellness topic (which would be quantitative in nature):

Does student self-care predict the well-being scores of engineering graduate students? Does student support predict the well-being scores of engineering students? Do student self-care and student support interact when predicting well-being in engineering graduate students?  

You’ll probably notice that there’s quite a formulaic approach to this. In other words, the research questions are basically the research objectives “converted” into question format. While that is true most of the time, it’s not always the case. For example, the first research objective for the digital transformation topic was more or less a step on the path toward the other objectives, and as such, it didn’t warrant its own research question.  

So, don’t rush your research questions and sloppily reword your objectives as questions. Carefully think about what exactly you’re trying to achieve (i.e. your research aim) and the objectives you’ve set out, then craft a set of well-aligned research questions . Also, keep in mind that this can be a somewhat iterative process , where you go back and tweak research objectives and aims to ensure tight alignment throughout the golden thread.

The importance of strong alignment 

Alignment is the keyword here and we have to stress its importance . Simply put, you need to make sure that there is a very tight alignment between all three pieces of the golden thread. If your research aims and research questions don’t align, for example, your project will be pulling in different directions and will lack focus . This is a common problem students face and can cause many headaches (and tears), so be warned.

Take the time to carefully craft your research aims, objectives and research questions before you run off down the research path. Ideally, get your research supervisor/advisor to review and comment on your golden thread before you invest significant time into your project, and certainly before you start collecting data .  

Recap: The golden thread

In this post, we unpacked the golden thread of research, consisting of the research aims , research objectives and research questions . You can jump back to any section using the links below.

As always, feel free to leave a comment below – we always love to hear from you. Also, if you’re interested in 1-on-1 support, take a look at our private coaching service here.

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

39 Comments

Thank you very much for your great effort put. As an Undergraduate taking Demographic Research & Methodology, I’ve been trying so hard to understand clearly what is a Research Question, Research Aim and the Objectives in a research and the relationship between them etc. But as for now I’m thankful that you’ve solved my problem.

Well appreciated. This has helped me greatly in doing my dissertation.

An so delighted with this wonderful information thank you a lot.

so impressive i have benefited a lot looking forward to learn more on research.

I am very happy to have carefully gone through this well researched article.

Infact,I used to be phobia about anything research, because of my poor understanding of the concepts.

Now,I get to know that my research question is the same as my research objective(s) rephrased in question format.

I please I would need a follow up on the subject,as I intends to join the team of researchers. Thanks once again.

Thanks so much. This was really helpful.

I know you pepole have tried to break things into more understandable and easy format. And God bless you. Keep it up

i found this document so useful towards my study in research methods. thanks so much.

This is my 2nd read topic in your course and I should commend the simplified explanations of each part. I’m beginning to understand and absorb the use of each part of a dissertation/thesis. I’ll keep on reading your free course and might be able to avail the training course! Kudos!

Thank you! Better put that my lecture and helped to easily understand the basics which I feel often get brushed over when beginning dissertation work.

This is quite helpful. I like how the Golden thread has been explained and the needed alignment.

This is quite helpful. I really appreciate!

The article made it simple for researcher students to differentiate between three concepts.

Very innovative and educational in approach to conducting research.

I am very impressed with all these terminology, as I am a fresh student for post graduate, I am highly guided and I promised to continue making consultation when the need arise. Thanks a lot.

A very helpful piece. thanks, I really appreciate it .

Very well explained, and it might be helpful to many people like me.

Wish i had found this (and other) resource(s) at the beginning of my PhD journey… not in my writing up year… 😩 Anyways… just a quick question as i’m having some issues ordering my “golden thread”…. does it matter in what order you mention them? i.e., is it always first aims, then objectives, and finally the questions? or can you first mention the research questions and then the aims and objectives?

Thank you for a very simple explanation that builds upon the concepts in a very logical manner. Just prior to this, I read the research hypothesis article, which was equally very good. This met my primary objective.

My secondary objective was to understand the difference between research questions and research hypothesis, and in which context to use which one. However, I am still not clear on this. Can you kindly please guide?

In research, a research question is a clear and specific inquiry that the researcher wants to answer, while a research hypothesis is a tentative statement or prediction about the relationship between variables or the expected outcome of the study. Research questions are broader and guide the overall study, while hypotheses are specific and testable statements used in quantitative research. Research questions identify the problem, while hypotheses provide a focus for testing in the study.

Exactly what I need in this research journey, I look forward to more of your coaching videos.

This helped a lot. Thanks so much for the effort put into explaining it.

What data source in writing dissertation/Thesis requires?

What is data source covers when writing dessertation/thesis

This is quite useful thanks

I’m excited and thankful. I got so much value which will help me progress in my thesis.

where are the locations of the reserch statement, research objective and research question in a reserach paper? Can you write an ouline that defines their places in the researh paper?

Very helpful and important tips on Aims, Objectives and Questions.

Thank you so much for making research aim, research objectives and research question so clear. This will be helpful to me as i continue with my thesis.

Thanks much for this content. I learned a lot. And I am inspired to learn more. I am still struggling with my preparation for dissertation outline/proposal. But I consistently follow contents and tutorials and the new FB of GRAD Coach. Hope to really become confident in writing my dissertation and successfully defend it.

As a researcher and lecturer, I find splitting research goals into research aims, objectives, and questions is unnecessarily bureaucratic and confusing for students. For most biomedical research projects, including ‘real research’, 1-3 research questions will suffice (numbers may differ by discipline).

Awesome! Very important resources and presented in an informative way to easily understand the golden thread. Indeed, thank you so much.

Well explained

The blog article on research aims, objectives, and questions by Grad Coach is a clear and insightful guide that aligns with my experiences in academic research. The article effectively breaks down the often complex concepts of research aims and objectives, providing a straightforward and accessible explanation. Drawing from my own research endeavors, I appreciate the practical tips offered, such as the need for specificity and clarity when formulating research questions. The article serves as a valuable resource for students and researchers, offering a concise roadmap for crafting well-defined research goals and objectives. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced researcher, this article provides practical insights that contribute to the foundational aspects of a successful research endeavor.

A great thanks for you. it is really amazing explanation. I grasp a lot and one step up to research knowledge.

I really found these tips helpful. Thank you very much Grad Coach.

I found this article helpful. Thanks for sharing this.

thank you so much, the explanation and examples are really helpful

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Research Objectives: The Compass of Your Study

Table of contents

• 1 Definition and Purpose of Setting Clear Research Objectives
• 2 How Research Objectives Fit into the Overall Research Framework
• 3 Types of Research Objectives
• 4 Aligning Objectives with Research Questions and Hypotheses
• 5 Role of Research Objectives in Various Research Phases
• 6.1 Key characteristics of well-defined research objectives
• 6.2 Step-by-Step Guide on How to Formulate Both General and Specific Research Objectives
• 6.3 How to Know When Your Objectives Need Refinement
• 7 Research Objectives Examples in Different Fields
• 8 Conclusion

Embarking on a research journey without clear objectives is like navigating the sea without a compass. This article delves into the essence of establishing precise research objectives, serving as the guiding star for your scholarly exploration.

We will unfold the layers of how the objective of study not only defines the scope of your research but also directs every phase of the research process, from formulating research questions to interpreting research findings. By bridging theory with practical examples, we aim to illuminate the path to crafting effective research objectives that are both ambitious and attainable. Let’s chart the course to a successful research voyage, exploring the significance, types, and formulation of research paper objectives.

Definition and Purpose of Setting Clear Research Objectives

Defining the research objectives includes which two tasks? Research objectives are clear and concise statements that outline what you aim to achieve through your study. They are the foundation for determining your research scope, guiding your data collection methods, and shaping your analysis. The purpose of research proposal and setting clear objectives in it is to ensure that your research efforts are focused and efficient, and to provide a roadmap that keeps your study aligned with its intended outcomes.

To define the research objective at the outset, researchers can avoid the pitfalls of scope creep, where the study’s focus gradually broadens beyond its initial boundaries, leading to wasted resources and time. Clear objectives facilitate communication with stakeholders, such as funding bodies, academic supervisors, and the broader academic community, by succinctly conveying the study’s goals and significance. Furthermore, they help in the formulation of precise research questions and hypotheses, making the research process more systematic and organized. Yet, it is not always easy. For this reason, PapersOwl is always ready to help. Lastly, clear research objectives enable the researcher to critically assess the study’s progress and outcomes against predefined benchmarks, ensuring the research stays on track and delivers meaningful results.

How Research Objectives Fit into the Overall Research Framework

Research objectives are integral to the research framework as the nexus between the research problem, questions, and hypotheses. They translate the broad goals of your study into actionable steps, ensuring every aspect of your research is purposefully aligned towards addressing the research problem. This alignment helps in structuring the research design and methodology, ensuring that each component of the study is geared towards answering the core questions derived from the objectives. Creating such a difficult piece may take a lot of time. If you need it to be accurate yet fast delivered, consider getting professional research paper writing help whenever the time comes. It also aids in the identification and justification of the research methods and tools used for data collection and analysis, aligning them with the objectives to enhance the validity and reliability of the findings.

Furthermore, by setting clear objectives, researchers can more effectively evaluate the impact and significance of their work in contributing to existing knowledge. Additionally, research objectives guide literature review, enabling researchers to focus their examination on relevant studies and theoretical frameworks that directly inform their research goals.

Types of Research Objectives

In the landscape of research, setting objectives is akin to laying down the tracks for a train’s journey, guiding it towards its destination. Constructing these tracks involves defining two main types of objectives: general and specific. Each serves a unique purpose in guiding the research towards its ultimate goals, with general objectives providing the broad vision and specific objectives outlining the concrete steps needed to fulfill that vision. Together, they form a cohesive blueprint that directs the focus of the study, ensuring that every effort contributes meaningfully to the overarching research aims.

• General objectives articulate the overarching goals of your study. They are broad, setting the direction for your research without delving into specifics. These objectives capture what you wish to explore or contribute to existing knowledge.
• Specific objectives break down the general objectives into measurable outcomes. They are precise, detailing the steps needed to achieve the broader goals of your study. They often correspond to different aspects of your research question , ensuring a comprehensive approach to your study.

To illustrate, consider a research project on the impact of digital marketing on consumer behavior. A general objective might be “to explore the influence of digital marketing on consumer purchasing decisions.” Specific objectives could include “to assess the effectiveness of social media advertising in enhancing brand awareness” and “to evaluate the impact of email marketing on customer loyalty.”

Aligning Objectives with Research Questions and Hypotheses

The harmony between what research objectives should be, questions, and hypotheses is critical. Objectives define what you aim to achieve; research questions specify what you seek to understand, and hypotheses predict the expected outcomes.

This alignment ensures a coherent and focused research endeavor. Achieving it necessitates a thoughtful consideration of how each component interrelates, ensuring that the objectives are not only ambitious but also directly answerable through the research questions and testable via the hypotheses. This interconnectedness facilitates a streamlined approach to the research process, enabling researchers to systematically address each aspect of their study in a logical sequence. Moreover, it enhances the clarity and precision of the research, making it easier for peers and stakeholders to grasp the study’s direction and potential contributions.

Role of Research Objectives in Various Research Phases

Throughout the research process, objectives guide your choices and strategies – from selecting the appropriate research design and methods to analyzing data and interpreting results. They are the criteria against which you measure the success of your study. In the initial stages, research objectives inform the selection of a topic, helping to narrow down a broad area of interest into a focused question that can be explored in depth. During the methodology phase, they dictate the type of data needed and the best methods for obtaining that data, ensuring that every step taken is purposeful and aligned with the study’s goals. As the research progresses, objectives provide a framework for analyzing the collected data, guiding the researcher in identifying patterns, drawing conclusions, and making informed decisions.

Crafting Effective Research Objectives

The effective objective of research is pivotal in laying the groundwork for a successful investigation. These objectives clarify the focus of your study and determine its direction and scope. Ensuring that your objectives are well-defined and aligned with the SMART criteria is crucial for setting a strong foundation for your research.

Key characteristics of well-defined research objectives

Well-defined research objectives are characterized by the SMART criteria – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Specific objectives clearly define what you plan to achieve, eliminating any ambiguity. Measurable objectives allow you to track progress and assess the outcome. Achievable objectives are realistic, considering the research sources and time available. Relevant objectives align with the broader goals of your field or research question. Finally, Time-bound objectives have a clear timeline for completion, adding urgency and a schedule to your work.

Step-by-Step Guide on How to Formulate Both General and Specific Research Objectives

So lets get to the part, how to write research objectives properly?

• Understand the issue or gap in existing knowledge your study aims to address.
• Gain insights into how similar challenges have been approached to refine your objectives.
• Articulate the broad goal of research based on your understanding of the problem.
• Detail the specific aspects of your research, ensuring they are actionable and measurable.

How to Know When Your Objectives Need Refinement

Your objectives of research may require refinement if they lack clarity, feasibility, or alignment with the research problem. If you find yourself struggling to design experiments or methods that directly address your objectives, or if the objectives seem too broad or not directly related to your research question, it’s likely time for refinement. Additionally, objectives in research proposal that do not facilitate a clear measurement of success indicate a need for a more precise definition. Refinement involves ensuring that each objective is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, enhancing your research’s overall focus and impact.

Research Objectives Examples in Different Fields

The application of research objectives spans various academic disciplines, each with its unique focus and methodologies. To illustrate how the objectives of the study guide a research paper across different fields, here are some research objective examples:

• In Health Sciences , a research aim may be to “determine the efficacy of a new vaccine in reducing the incidence of a specific disease among a target population within one year.” This objective is specific (efficacy of a new vaccine), measurable (reduction in disease incidence), achievable (with the right study design and sample size), relevant (to public health), and time-bound (within one year).
• In Environmental Studies , the study objectives could be “to assess the impact of air pollution on urban biodiversity over a decade.” This reflects a commitment to understanding the long-term effects of human activities on urban ecosystems, emphasizing the need for sustainable urban planning.
• In Economics , an example objective of a study might be “to analyze the relationship between fiscal policies and unemployment rates in developing countries over the past twenty years.” This seeks to explore macroeconomic trends and inform policymaking, highlighting the role of economic research study in societal development.

These examples of research objectives describe the versatility and significance of research objectives in guiding scholarly inquiry across different domains. By setting clear, well-defined objectives, researchers can ensure their studies are focused and impactful and contribute valuable knowledge to their respective fields.

Defining research studies objectives and problem statement is not just a preliminary step, but a continuous guiding force throughout the research journey. These goals of research illuminate the path forward and ensure that every stride taken is meaningful and aligned with the ultimate goals of the inquiry. Whether through the meticulous application of the SMART criteria or the strategic alignment with research questions and hypotheses, the rigor in crafting and refining these objectives underscores the integrity and relevance of the research. As scholars venture into the vast terrains of knowledge, the clarity, and precision of their objectives serve as beacons of light, steering their explorations toward discoveries that advance academic discourse and resonate with the broader societal needs.

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• Writing Tips

How to Write Research Objectives

• 3-minute read
• 22nd November 2021

Writing a research paper, thesis, or dissertation ? If so, you’ll want to state your research objectives in the introduction of your paper to make it clear to your readers what you’re trying to accomplish. But how do you write effective research objectives? In this post, we’ll look at two key topics to help you do this:

• How to use your research aims as a basis for developing objectives.
• How to use SMART criteria to refine your research objectives.

For more advice on how to write strong research objectives, see below.

Research Aims and Objectives

There is an important difference between research aims and research objectives:

• A research aim defines the main purpose of your research. As such, you can think of your research aim as answering the question “What are you doing?”
• Research objectives (as most studies will have more than one) are the steps you will take to fulfil your aims. As such, your objectives should answer the question “How are you conducting your research?”

For instance, an example research aim could be:

This study will investigate the link between dehydration and the incidence of urinary tract infections (UTIs) in intensive care patients in Australia.

To develop a set of research objectives, you would then break down the various steps involved in meeting said aim. For example:

This study will investigate the link between dehydration and the incidence of urinary tract infections (UTIs) in intensive care patients in Australia. To achieve this, the study objectives w ill include:

• Replicat ing a small Singaporean study into the role of dehydration in UTIs in hospital patients (Sepe, 2018) in a larger Australian cohort.
• Trialing the use of intravenous fluids for intensive care patients to prevent dehydration.
• Assessing the relationship between the age of patients and quantities of intravenous fluids needed to counter dehydration.

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Note that the objectives don’t go into any great detail here. The key is to briefly summarize each component of your study. You can save details for how you will conduct the research for the methodology section of your paper.

Make Your Research Objectives SMART

A great way to refine your research objectives is to use SMART criteria . Borrowed from the world of project management, there are many versions of this system. However, we’re going to focus on developing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound objectives.

In other words, a good research objective should be all of the following:

• S pecific – Is the objective clear and well-defined?
• M easurable – How will you know when the objective has been achieved? Is there a way to measure the thing you’re seeking to do?
• A chievable – Do you have the support and resources necessary to undertake this action? Are you being overly ambitious with this objective?
• R elevant – Is this objective vital for fulfilling your research aim?
• T imebound – Can this action be realistically undertaken in the time you have?

If you follow this system, your research objectives will be much stronger.

Expert Research Proofreading

Whatever your research aims and objectives, make sure to have your academic writing proofread by the experts!

Our academic editors can help you with research papers and proposals , as well as any other scholarly document you need checking. And this will help to ensure that your academic writing is always clear, concise, and precise.

Submit a free sample document today to trial our services and find out more.

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Crafting Clear Pathways: Writing Objectives in Research Papers

Struggling to write research objectives? Follow our easy steps to learn how to craft effective and compelling objectives in research papers.

Are you struggling to define the goals and direction of your research? Are you losing yourself while doing research and tend to go astray from the intended research topic? Fear not, as many face the same problem and it is quite understandable to overcome this, a concept called research objective comes into play here.

In this article, we’ll delve into the world of the objectives in research papers and why they are essential for a successful study. We will be studying what they are and how they are used in research.

What is a Research Objective?

A research objective is a clear and specific goal that a researcher aims to achieve through a research study. It serves as a roadmap for the research, providing direction and focus. Research objectives are formulated based on the research questions or hypotheses, and they help in defining the scope of the study and guiding the research design and methodology. They also assist in evaluating the success and outcomes of the research.

Types of Research Objectives

There are typically three main types of objectives in a research paper:

• Exploratory Objectives: These objectives are focused on gaining a deeper understanding of a particular phenomenon, topic, or issue. Exploratory research objectives aim to explore and identify new ideas, insights, or patterns that were previously unknown or poorly understood. This type of objective is commonly used in preliminary or qualitative studies.
• Descriptive Objectives: Descriptive objectives seek to describe and document the characteristics, behaviors, or attributes of a specific population, event, or phenomenon. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive and accurate account of the subject of study. Descriptive research objectives often involve collecting and analyzing data through surveys, observations, or archival research.
• Explanatory or Causal Objectives: Explanatory objectives aim to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between variables or factors. These objectives focus on understanding why certain events or phenomena occur and how they are related to each other. 

Also Read: What are the types of research?

Steps for Writing Objectives in Research Paper

1. identify the research topic:.

Clearly define the subject or topic of your research. This will provide a broad context for developing specific research objectives.

2. Conduct a Literature Review

Review existing literature and research related to your topic. This will help you understand the current state of knowledge, identify any research gaps, and refine your research objectives accordingly.

3. Identify the Research Questions or Hypotheses

Formulate specific research questions or hypotheses that you want to address in your study. These questions should be directly related to your research topic and guide the development of your research objectives.

4. Focus on Specific Goals

Break down the broader research questions or hypothesis into specific goals or objectives. Each objective should focus on a particular aspect of your research topic and be achievable within the scope of your study.

5. Use Clear and Measurable Language

Write your research objectives using clear and precise language. Avoid vague terms and use specific and measurable terms that can be observed, analyzed, or measured.

6. Consider Feasibility

Ensure that your research objectives are feasible within the available resources, time constraints, and ethical considerations. They should be realistic and attainable given the limitations of your study.

7. Prioritize Objectives

If you have multiple research objectives, prioritize them based on their importance and relevance to your overall research goals. This will help you allocate resources and focus your efforts accordingly.

8. Review and Refine

Review your research objectives to ensure they align with your research questions or hypotheses, and revise them if necessary. Seek feedback from peers or advisors to ensure clarity and coherence.

Tips for Writing Objectives in Research Paper

1. be clear and specific.

Clearly state what you intend to achieve with your research. Use specific language that leaves no room for ambiguity or confusion. This ensures that your objectives are well-defined and focused.

2. Use Action Verbs

Begin each research objective with an action verb that describes a measurable action or outcome. This helps make your objectives more actionable and measurable.

3. Align with Research Questions or Hypotheses

Your research objectives should directly address the research questions or hypotheses you have formulated. Ensure there is a clear connection between them to maintain coherence in your study.

4. Be Realistic and Feasible

Set research objectives that are attainable within the constraints of your study, including available resources, time, and ethical considerations. Unrealistic objectives may undermine the validity and reliability of your research.

5. Consider Relevance and Significance

Your research objectives should be relevant to your research topic and contribute to the broader field of study. Consider the potential impact and significance of achieving the objectives.

SMART Goals for Writing Research Objectives

To ensure that your research objectives are well-defined and effectively guide your study, you can apply the SMART framework. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Here’s how you can make your research objectives SMART:

• Specific : Clearly state what you want to achieve in a precise and specific manner. Avoid vague or generalized language. Specify the population, variables, or phenomena of interest.
• Measurable : Ensure that your research objectives can be quantified or observed in a measurable way. This allows for objective evaluation and assessment of progress.
• Achievable : Set research objectives that are realistic and attainable within the available resources, time, and scope of your study. Consider the feasibility of conducting the research and collecting the necessary data.
• Relevant : Ensure that your research objectives are directly relevant to your research topic and contribute to the broader knowledge or understanding of the field. They should align with the purpose and significance of your study.
• Time-bound : Set a specific timeframe or deadline for achieving your research objectives. This helps create a sense of urgency and provides a clear timeline for your study.

Examples of Research Objectives

Here are some examples of research objectives from various fields of study:

• To examine the relationship between social media usage and self-esteem among young adults aged 18-25 in order to understand the potential impact on mental well-being.
• To assess the effectiveness of a mindfulness-based intervention in reducing stress levels and improving coping mechanisms among individuals diagnosed with anxiety disorders.
• To investigate the factors influencing consumer purchasing decisions in the e-commerce industry, with a focus on the role of online reviews and social media influencers.
• To analyze the effects of climate change on the biodiversity of coral reefs in a specific region, using remote sensing techniques and field surveys.

Importance of Research Objectives

Research objectives play a crucial role in the research process and hold significant importance for several reasons:

• Guiding the Research Process: Research objectives provide a clear roadmap for the entire research process. They help researchers stay focused and on track, ensuring that the study remains purposeful and relevant. 
• Defining the Scope of the Study: Research objectives help in determining the boundaries and scope of the study. They clarify what aspects of the research topic will be explored and what will be excluded. 
• Providing Direction for Data Collection and Analysis: Research objectives assist in identifying the type of data to be collected and the methods of data collection. They also guide the selection of appropriate data analysis techniques. 
• Evaluating the Success of the Study: Research objectives serve as benchmarks for evaluating the success and outcomes of the research. They provide measurable criteria against which the researcher can assess whether the objectives have been met or not. 
• Enhancing Communication and Collaboration: Clearly defined research objectives facilitate effective communication and collaboration among researchers, advisors, and stakeholders. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid While Writing Research Objectives

When writing research objectives, it’s important to be aware of common mistakes and pitfalls that can undermine the effectiveness and clarity of your objectives. Here are some common mistakes to avoid:

• Vague or Ambiguous Language: One of the key mistakes is using vague or ambiguous language that lacks specificity. Ensure that your research objectives are clearly and precisely stated, leaving no room for misinterpretation or confusion.
• Lack of Measurability: Research objectives should be measurable, meaning that they should allow for the collection of data or evidence that can be quantified or observed. Avoid setting objectives that cannot be measured or assessed objectively.
• Lack of Alignment with Research Questions or Hypotheses: Your research objectives should directly align with the research questions or hypotheses you have formulated. Make sure there is a clear connection between them to maintain coherence in your study.
• Overgeneralization : Avoid writing research objectives that are too broad or encompass too many variables or phenomena. Overgeneralized objectives may lead to a lack of focus or feasibility in conducting the research.
• Unrealistic or Unattainable Objectives: Ensure that your research objectives are realistic and attainable within the available resources, time, and scope of your study. Setting unrealistic objectives may compromise the validity and reliability of your research.

In conclusion, research objectives are integral to the success and effectiveness of any research study. They provide a clear direction, focus, and purpose, guiding the entire research process from start to finish. By formulating specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives, researchers can define the scope of their study, guide data collection and analysis, and evaluate the outcomes of their research.

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About Sowjanya Pedada

Sowjanya is a passionate writer and an avid reader. She holds MBA in Agribusiness Management and now is working as a content writer. She loves to play with words and hopes to make a difference in the world through her writings. Apart from writing, she is interested in reading fiction novels and doing craftwork. She also loves to travel and explore different cuisines and spend time with her family and friends.

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• A Research Guide
• Research Paper Guide

How to Write Research Objectives

• What are research objectives
• Step-by-step writing guide
• Helpful tips
• Research objectives examples

What are research objectives, and why are they important?

Step-by-step research objectives writing guide, step 1: provide the major background of your research, step 2: mention several objectives from the most to least important aspects, step 3: follow your resources and do not promise too much, step 4: keep your objectives and limitations mentioned, step 5: provide action verbs and tone, helpful tips for writing research objectives.

• Keep your content specific! It is necessary to narrow things down and leave no space for double meanings or confusion. If some idea cannot be supported with a piece of evidence, it’s better to avoid it in your objectives.
• Objectives must be measurable! It is crucial to make it possible to replicate your work in further research. Creating an outline as you strive for your goals and set the purpose is necessary.
• Keeping things relevant! Your research objectives should be related to your thesis statement and the subject that you have chosen to work with. It will help to avoid introducing ideas that are not related to your work.
• Temporal factor! Set deadlines to track your progress and provide a setting for your research if it is relevant. It will help your target audience to see your limitations and specifics.

Research objectives example

Research objective 1: The study aims to explore the origins and evolution of the youth movements in the Flemish provinces in Belgium, namely Chiro and KSA. This research evaluates the major differences during the post-WW2 period and the social factors that created differences between the movements. 

Research objective 2: This paper implements surveys and personal interviews to determine first-hand feedback from the youth members and the team leaders. 

Research objective 3: Aiming to compare and contrast, this study determines the positive outcomes of the unity project work between the branches of the youth movement in Belgium, aiming for statistical data to support it. 

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• Aims and Objectives – A Guide for Academic Writing
• Doing a PhD

One of the most important aspects of a thesis, dissertation or research paper is the correct formulation of the aims and objectives. This is because your aims and objectives will establish the scope, depth and direction that your research will ultimately take. An effective set of aims and objectives will give your research focus and your reader clarity, with your aims indicating what is to be achieved, and your objectives indicating how it will be achieved.

Introduction

There is no getting away from the importance of the aims and objectives in determining the success of your research project. Unfortunately, however, it is an aspect that many students struggle with, and ultimately end up doing poorly. Given their importance, if you suspect that there is even the smallest possibility that you belong to this group of students, we strongly recommend you read this page in full.

This page describes what research aims and objectives are, how they differ from each other, how to write them correctly, and the common mistakes students make and how to avoid them. An example of a good aim and objectives from a past thesis has also been deconstructed to help your understanding.

What Are Aims and Objectives?

Research aims.

A research aim describes the main goal or the overarching purpose of your research project.

In doing so, it acts as a focal point for your research and provides your readers with clarity as to what your study is all about. Because of this, research aims are almost always located within its own subsection under the introduction section of a research document, regardless of whether it’s a thesis , a dissertation, or a research paper .

A research aim is usually formulated as a broad statement of the main goal of the research and can range in length from a single sentence to a short paragraph. Although the exact format may vary according to preference, they should all describe why your research is needed (i.e. the context), what it sets out to accomplish (the actual aim) and, briefly, how it intends to accomplish it (overview of your objectives).

To give an example, we have extracted the following research aim from a real PhD thesis:

Example of a Research Aim

The role of diametrical cup deformation as a factor to unsatisfactory implant performance has not been widely reported. The aim of this thesis was to gain an understanding of the diametrical deformation behaviour of acetabular cups and shells following impaction into the reamed acetabulum. The influence of a range of factors on deformation was investigated to ascertain if cup and shell deformation may be high enough to potentially contribute to early failure and high wear rates in metal-on-metal implants.

Note: Extracted with permission from thesis titled “T he Impact And Deformation Of Press-Fit Metal Acetabular Components ” produced by Dr H Hothi of previously Queen Mary University of London.

Research Objectives

Where a research aim specifies what your study will answer, research objectives specify how your study will answer it.

They divide your research aim into several smaller parts, each of which represents a key section of your research project. As a result, almost all research objectives take the form of a numbered list, with each item usually receiving its own chapter in a dissertation or thesis.

Following the example of the research aim shared above, here are it’s real research objectives as an example:

Example of a Research Objective

• Develop finite element models using explicit dynamics to mimic mallet blows during cup/shell insertion, initially using simplified experimentally validated foam models to represent the acetabulum.
• Investigate the number, velocity and position of impacts needed to insert a cup.
• Determine the relationship between the size of interference between the cup and cavity and deformation for different cup types.
• Investigate the influence of non-uniform cup support and varying the orientation of the component in the cavity on deformation.
• Examine the influence of errors during reaming of the acetabulum which introduce ovality to the cavity.
• Determine the relationship between changes in the geometry of the component and deformation for different cup designs.
• Develop three dimensional pelvis models with non-uniform bone material properties from a range of patients with varying bone quality.
• Use the key parameters that influence deformation, as identified in the foam models to determine the range of deformations that may occur clinically using the anatomic models and if these deformations are clinically significant.

It’s worth noting that researchers sometimes use research questions instead of research objectives, or in other cases both. From a high-level perspective, research questions and research objectives make the same statements, but just in different formats.

Taking the first three research objectives as an example, they can be restructured into research questions as follows:

Restructuring Research Objectives as Research Questions

• Can finite element models using simplified experimentally validated foam models to represent the acetabulum together with explicit dynamics be used to mimic mallet blows during cup/shell insertion?
• What is the number, velocity and position of impacts needed to insert a cup?
• What is the relationship between the size of interference between the cup and cavity and deformation for different cup types?

Difference Between Aims and Objectives

Hopefully the above explanations make clear the differences between aims and objectives, but to clarify:

• The research aim focus on what the research project is intended to achieve; research objectives focus on how the aim will be achieved.
• Research aims are relatively broad; research objectives are specific.
• Research aims focus on a project’s long-term outcomes; research objectives focus on its immediate, short-term outcomes.
• A research aim can be written in a single sentence or short paragraph; research objectives should be written as a numbered list.

How to Write Aims and Objectives

Before we discuss how to write a clear set of research aims and objectives, we should make it clear that there is no single way they must be written. Each researcher will approach their aims and objectives slightly differently, and often your supervisor will influence the formulation of yours on the basis of their own preferences.

Regardless, there are some basic principles that you should observe for good practice; these principles are described below.

Your aim should be made up of three parts that answer the below questions:

• Why is this research required?
• What is this research about?
• How are you going to do it?

The easiest way to achieve this would be to address each question in its own sentence, although it does not matter whether you combine them or write multiple sentences for each, the key is to address each one.

The first question, why , provides context to your research project, the second question, what , describes the aim of your research, and the last question, how , acts as an introduction to your objectives which will immediately follow.

Scroll through the image set below to see the ‘why, what and how’ associated with our research aim example.

Note: Your research aims need not be limited to one. Some individuals per to define one broad ‘overarching aim’ of a project and then adopt two or three specific research aims for their thesis or dissertation. Remember, however, that in order for your assessors to consider your research project complete, you will need to prove you have fulfilled all of the aims you set out to achieve. Therefore, while having more than one research aim is not necessarily disadvantageous, consider whether a single overarching one will do.

Research Objectives

Each of your research objectives should be SMART :

• Specific – is there any ambiguity in the action you are going to undertake, or is it focused and well-defined?
• Measurable – how will you measure progress and determine when you have achieved the action?
• Achievable – do you have the support, resources and facilities required to carry out the action?
• Relevant – is the action essential to the achievement of your research aim?
• Timebound – can you realistically complete the action in the available time alongside your other research tasks?

In addition to being SMART, your research objectives should start with a verb that helps communicate your intent. Common research verbs include:

Table of Research Verbs to Use in Aims and Objectives

Last, format your objectives into a numbered list. This is because when you write your thesis or dissertation, you will at times need to make reference to a specific research objective; structuring your research objectives in a numbered list will provide a clear way of doing this.

To bring all this together, let’s compare the first research objective in the previous example with the above guidance:

Checking Research Objective Example Against Recommended Approach

Research Objective:

1. Develop finite element models using explicit dynamics to mimic mallet blows during cup/shell insertion, initially using simplified experimentally validated foam models to represent the acetabulum.

Checking Against Recommended Approach:

Q: Is it specific? A: Yes, it is clear what the student intends to do (produce a finite element model), why they intend to do it (mimic cup/shell blows) and their parameters have been well-defined ( using simplified experimentally validated foam models to represent the acetabulum ).

Q: Is it measurable? A: Yes, it is clear that the research objective will be achieved once the finite element model is complete.

Q: Is it achievable? A: Yes, provided the student has access to a computer lab, modelling software and laboratory data.

Q: Is it relevant? A: Yes, mimicking impacts to a cup/shell is fundamental to the overall aim of understanding how they deform when impacted upon.

Q: Is it timebound? A: Yes, it is possible to create a limited-scope finite element model in a relatively short time, especially if you already have experience in modelling.

Q: Does it start with a verb? A: Yes, it starts with ‘develop’, which makes the intent of the objective immediately clear.

Q: Is it a numbered list? A: Yes, it is the first research objective in a list of eight.

Mistakes in Writing Research Aims and Objectives

1. making your research aim too broad.

Having a research aim too broad becomes very difficult to achieve. Normally, this occurs when a student develops their research aim before they have a good understanding of what they want to research. Remember that at the end of your project and during your viva defence , you will have to prove that you have achieved your research aims; if they are too broad, this will be an almost impossible task. In the early stages of your research project, your priority should be to narrow your study to a specific area. A good way to do this is to take the time to study existing literature, question their current approaches, findings and limitations, and consider whether there are any recurring gaps that could be investigated .

Note: Achieving a set of aims does not necessarily mean proving or disproving a theory or hypothesis, even if your research aim was to, but having done enough work to provide a useful and original insight into the principles that underlie your research aim.

2. Making Your Research Objectives Too Ambitious

Be realistic about what you can achieve in the time you have available. It is natural to want to set ambitious research objectives that require sophisticated data collection and analysis, but only completing this with six months before the end of your PhD registration period is not a worthwhile trade-off.

3. Formulating Repetitive Research Objectives

Each research objective should have its own purpose and distinct measurable outcome. To this effect, a common mistake is to form research objectives which have large amounts of overlap. This makes it difficult to determine when an objective is truly complete, and also presents challenges in estimating the duration of objectives when creating your project timeline. It also makes it difficult to structure your thesis into unique chapters, making it more challenging for you to write and for your audience to read.

Fortunately, this oversight can be easily avoided by using SMART objectives.

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of how to create an effective set of aims and objectives for your research project, whether it be a thesis, dissertation or research paper. While it may be tempting to dive directly into your research, spending time on getting your aims and objectives right will give your research clear direction. This won’t only reduce the likelihood of problems arising later down the line, but will also lead to a more thorough and coherent research project.

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Home » Research Paper – Structure, Examples and Writing Guide

Research Paper – Structure, Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Research Paper

Definition:

Research Paper is a written document that presents the author’s original research, analysis, and interpretation of a specific topic or issue.

It is typically based on Empirical Evidence, and may involve qualitative or quantitative research methods, or a combination of both. The purpose of a research paper is to contribute new knowledge or insights to a particular field of study, and to demonstrate the author’s understanding of the existing literature and theories related to the topic.

Structure of Research Paper

The structure of a research paper typically follows a standard format, consisting of several sections that convey specific information about the research study. The following is a detailed explanation of the structure of a research paper:

The title page contains the title of the paper, the name(s) of the author(s), and the affiliation(s) of the author(s). It also includes the date of submission and possibly, the name of the journal or conference where the paper is to be published.

The abstract is a brief summary of the research paper, typically ranging from 100 to 250 words. It should include the research question, the methods used, the key findings, and the implications of the results. The abstract should be written in a concise and clear manner to allow readers to quickly grasp the essence of the research.

Introduction

The introduction section of a research paper provides background information about the research problem, the research question, and the research objectives. It also outlines the significance of the research, the research gap that it aims to fill, and the approach taken to address the research question. Finally, the introduction section ends with a clear statement of the research hypothesis or research question.

Literature Review

The literature review section of a research paper provides an overview of the existing literature on the topic of study. It includes a critical analysis and synthesis of the literature, highlighting the key concepts, themes, and debates. The literature review should also demonstrate the research gap and how the current study seeks to address it.

The methods section of a research paper describes the research design, the sample selection, the data collection and analysis procedures, and the statistical methods used to analyze the data. This section should provide sufficient detail for other researchers to replicate the study.

The results section presents the findings of the research, using tables, graphs, and figures to illustrate the data. The findings should be presented in a clear and concise manner, with reference to the research question and hypothesis.

The discussion section of a research paper interprets the findings and discusses their implications for the research question, the literature review, and the field of study. It should also address the limitations of the study and suggest future research directions.

The conclusion section summarizes the main findings of the study, restates the research question and hypothesis, and provides a final reflection on the significance of the research.

The references section provides a list of all the sources cited in the paper, following a specific citation style such as APA, MLA or Chicago.

How to Write Research Paper

You can write Research Paper by the following guide:

• Choose a Topic: The first step is to select a topic that interests you and is relevant to your field of study. Brainstorm ideas and narrow down to a research question that is specific and researchable.
• Conduct a Literature Review: The literature review helps you identify the gap in the existing research and provides a basis for your research question. It also helps you to develop a theoretical framework and research hypothesis.
• Develop a Thesis Statement : The thesis statement is the main argument of your research paper. It should be clear, concise and specific to your research question.
• Plan your Research: Develop a research plan that outlines the methods, data sources, and data analysis procedures. This will help you to collect and analyze data effectively.
• Collect and Analyze Data: Collect data using various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, or experiments. Analyze data using statistical tools or other qualitative methods.
• Organize your Paper : Organize your paper into sections such as Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion. Ensure that each section is coherent and follows a logical flow.
• Write your Paper : Start by writing the introduction, followed by the literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. Ensure that your writing is clear, concise, and follows the required formatting and citation styles.
• Edit and Proofread your Paper: Review your paper for grammar and spelling errors, and ensure that it is well-structured and easy to read. Ask someone else to review your paper to get feedback and suggestions for improvement.
• Cite your Sources: Ensure that you properly cite all sources used in your research paper. This is essential for giving credit to the original authors and avoiding plagiarism.

Research Paper Example

Note : The below example research paper is for illustrative purposes only and is not an actual research paper. Actual research papers may have different structures, contents, and formats depending on the field of study, research question, data collection and analysis methods, and other factors. Students should always consult with their professors or supervisors for specific guidelines and expectations for their research papers.

Research Paper Example sample for Students:

Title: The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health among Young Adults

Abstract: This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults. A literature review was conducted to examine the existing research on the topic. A survey was then administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Introduction: Social media has become an integral part of modern life, particularly among young adults. While social media has many benefits, including increased communication and social connectivity, it has also been associated with negative outcomes, such as addiction, cyberbullying, and mental health problems. This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults.

Literature Review: The literature review highlights the existing research on the impact of social media use on mental health. The review shows that social media use is associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health problems. The review also identifies the factors that contribute to the negative impact of social media, including social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Methods : A survey was administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The survey included questions on social media use, mental health status (measured using the DASS-21), and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis.

Results : The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Discussion : The study’s findings suggest that social media use has a negative impact on the mental health of young adults. The study highlights the need for interventions that address the factors contributing to the negative impact of social media, such as social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Conclusion : In conclusion, social media use has a significant impact on the mental health of young adults. The study’s findings underscore the need for interventions that promote healthy social media use and address the negative outcomes associated with social media use. Future research can explore the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health. Additionally, longitudinal studies can investigate the long-term effects of social media use on mental health.

Limitations : The study has some limitations, including the use of self-report measures and a cross-sectional design. The use of self-report measures may result in biased responses, and a cross-sectional design limits the ability to establish causality.

Implications: The study’s findings have implications for mental health professionals, educators, and policymakers. Mental health professionals can use the findings to develop interventions that address the negative impact of social media use on mental health. Educators can incorporate social media literacy into their curriculum to promote healthy social media use among young adults. Policymakers can use the findings to develop policies that protect young adults from the negative outcomes associated with social media use.

References :

• Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive medicine reports, 15, 100918.
• Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., … & James, A. E. (2017). Use of multiple social media platforms and symptoms of depression and anxiety: A nationally-representative study among US young adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 1-9.
• Van der Meer, T. G., & Verhoeven, J. W. (2017). Social media and its impact on academic performance of students. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 16, 383-398.

Appendix : The survey used in this study is provided below.

Social Media and Mental Health Survey

• How often do you use social media per day?
• Less than 30 minutes
• 30 minutes to 1 hour
• 1 to 2 hours
• 2 to 4 hours
• More than 4 hours
• Which social media platforms do you use?
• Others (Please specify)
• How often do you experience the following on social media?
• Social comparison (comparing yourself to others)
• Cyberbullying
• Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
• Have you ever experienced any of the following mental health problems in the past month?
• Do you think social media use has a positive or negative impact on your mental health?
• Very positive
• Somewhat positive
• Somewhat negative
• Very negative
• In your opinion, which factors contribute to the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Social comparison
• In your opinion, what interventions could be effective in reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Education on healthy social media use
• Counseling for mental health problems caused by social media
• Social media detox programs
• Regulation of social media use

Thank you for your participation!

Applications of Research Paper

Research papers have several applications in various fields, including:

• Advancing knowledge: Research papers contribute to the advancement of knowledge by generating new insights, theories, and findings that can inform future research and practice. They help to answer important questions, clarify existing knowledge, and identify areas that require further investigation.
• Informing policy: Research papers can inform policy decisions by providing evidence-based recommendations for policymakers. They can help to identify gaps in current policies, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, and inform the development of new policies and regulations.
• Improving practice: Research papers can improve practice by providing evidence-based guidance for professionals in various fields, including medicine, education, business, and psychology. They can inform the development of best practices, guidelines, and standards of care that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• Educating students : Research papers are often used as teaching tools in universities and colleges to educate students about research methods, data analysis, and academic writing. They help students to develop critical thinking skills, research skills, and communication skills that are essential for success in many careers.
• Fostering collaboration: Research papers can foster collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers by providing a platform for sharing knowledge and ideas. They can facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships that can lead to innovative solutions to complex problems.

When to Write Research Paper

Research papers are typically written when a person has completed a research project or when they have conducted a study and have obtained data or findings that they want to share with the academic or professional community. Research papers are usually written in academic settings, such as universities, but they can also be written in professional settings, such as research organizations, government agencies, or private companies.

Here are some common situations where a person might need to write a research paper:

• For academic purposes: Students in universities and colleges are often required to write research papers as part of their coursework, particularly in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Writing research papers helps students to develop research skills, critical thinking skills, and academic writing skills.
• For publication: Researchers often write research papers to publish their findings in academic journals or to present their work at academic conferences. Publishing research papers is an important way to disseminate research findings to the academic community and to establish oneself as an expert in a particular field.
• To inform policy or practice : Researchers may write research papers to inform policy decisions or to improve practice in various fields. Research findings can be used to inform the development of policies, guidelines, and best practices that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• To share new insights or ideas: Researchers may write research papers to share new insights or ideas with the academic or professional community. They may present new theories, propose new research methods, or challenge existing paradigms in their field.

Purpose of Research Paper

The purpose of a research paper is to present the results of a study or investigation in a clear, concise, and structured manner. Research papers are written to communicate new knowledge, ideas, or findings to a specific audience, such as researchers, scholars, practitioners, or policymakers. The primary purposes of a research paper are:

• To contribute to the body of knowledge : Research papers aim to add new knowledge or insights to a particular field or discipline. They do this by reporting the results of empirical studies, reviewing and synthesizing existing literature, proposing new theories, or providing new perspectives on a topic.
• To inform or persuade: Research papers are written to inform or persuade the reader about a particular issue, topic, or phenomenon. They present evidence and arguments to support their claims and seek to persuade the reader of the validity of their findings or recommendations.
• To advance the field: Research papers seek to advance the field or discipline by identifying gaps in knowledge, proposing new research questions or approaches, or challenging existing assumptions or paradigms. They aim to contribute to ongoing debates and discussions within a field and to stimulate further research and inquiry.
• To demonstrate research skills: Research papers demonstrate the author’s research skills, including their ability to design and conduct a study, collect and analyze data, and interpret and communicate findings. They also demonstrate the author’s ability to critically evaluate existing literature, synthesize information from multiple sources, and write in a clear and structured manner.

Characteristics of Research Paper

Research papers have several characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of academic or professional writing. Here are some common characteristics of research papers:

• Evidence-based: Research papers are based on empirical evidence, which is collected through rigorous research methods such as experiments, surveys, observations, or interviews. They rely on objective data and facts to support their claims and conclusions.
• Structured and organized: Research papers have a clear and logical structure, with sections such as introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. They are organized in a way that helps the reader to follow the argument and understand the findings.
• Formal and objective: Research papers are written in a formal and objective tone, with an emphasis on clarity, precision, and accuracy. They avoid subjective language or personal opinions and instead rely on objective data and analysis to support their arguments.
• Citations and references: Research papers include citations and references to acknowledge the sources of information and ideas used in the paper. They use a specific citation style, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago, to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Peer-reviewed: Research papers are often peer-reviewed, which means they are evaluated by other experts in the field before they are published. Peer-review ensures that the research is of high quality, meets ethical standards, and contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field.
• Objective and unbiased: Research papers strive to be objective and unbiased in their presentation of the findings. They avoid personal biases or preconceptions and instead rely on the data and analysis to draw conclusions.

Advantages of Research Paper

Research papers have many advantages, both for the individual researcher and for the broader academic and professional community. Here are some advantages of research papers:

• Contribution to knowledge: Research papers contribute to the body of knowledge in a particular field or discipline. They add new information, insights, and perspectives to existing literature and help advance the understanding of a particular phenomenon or issue.
• Opportunity for intellectual growth: Research papers provide an opportunity for intellectual growth for the researcher. They require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, which can help develop the researcher’s skills and knowledge.
• Career advancement: Research papers can help advance the researcher’s career by demonstrating their expertise and contributions to the field. They can also lead to new research opportunities, collaborations, and funding.
• Academic recognition: Research papers can lead to academic recognition in the form of awards, grants, or invitations to speak at conferences or events. They can also contribute to the researcher’s reputation and standing in the field.
• Impact on policy and practice: Research papers can have a significant impact on policy and practice. They can inform policy decisions, guide practice, and lead to changes in laws, regulations, or procedures.
• Advancement of society: Research papers can contribute to the advancement of society by addressing important issues, identifying solutions to problems, and promoting social justice and equality.

Limitations of Research Paper

Research papers also have some limitations that should be considered when interpreting their findings or implications. Here are some common limitations of research papers:

• Limited generalizability: Research findings may not be generalizable to other populations, settings, or contexts. Studies often use specific samples or conditions that may not reflect the broader population or real-world situations.
• Potential for bias : Research papers may be biased due to factors such as sample selection, measurement errors, or researcher biases. It is important to evaluate the quality of the research design and methods used to ensure that the findings are valid and reliable.
• Ethical concerns: Research papers may raise ethical concerns, such as the use of vulnerable populations or invasive procedures. Researchers must adhere to ethical guidelines and obtain informed consent from participants to ensure that the research is conducted in a responsible and respectful manner.
• Limitations of methodology: Research papers may be limited by the methodology used to collect and analyze data. For example, certain research methods may not capture the complexity or nuance of a particular phenomenon, or may not be appropriate for certain research questions.
• Publication bias: Research papers may be subject to publication bias, where positive or significant findings are more likely to be published than negative or non-significant findings. This can skew the overall findings of a particular area of research.
• Time and resource constraints: Research papers may be limited by time and resource constraints, which can affect the quality and scope of the research. Researchers may not have access to certain data or resources, or may be unable to conduct long-term studies due to practical limitations.

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Handy Tips To Write A Clear Research Objectives With Examples

Introduction.

Research objectives play a crucial role in any research study. They provide a clear direction and purpose for the research, guiding the researcher in their investigation. Understanding research objectives is essential for conducting a successful study and achieving meaningful results.

In this comprehensive review, we will delve into the definition of research objectives, exploring their characteristics, types, and examples. We will also discuss the relationship between research objectives and research questions, as well as provide insights into how to write effective research objectives. Additionally, we will examine the role of research objectives in research methodology and highlight the importance of them in a study. By the end of this review, you will have a comprehensive understanding of research objectives and their significance in the research process.

Definition of Research Objectives: What Are They?

A research objective is defined as a clear and concise statement that outlines the specific goals and aims of a research study. These objectives are designed to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), ensuring they provide a structured pathway to accomplishing the intended outcomes of the project. Each objective serves as a foundational element that summarizes the purpose of your study, guiding the research activities and helping to measure progress toward the study’s goals. Additionally, research objectives are integral components of the research framework , establishing a clear direction that aligns with the overall research questions and hypotheses. This alignment helps to ensure that the study remains focused and relevant, facilitating the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data.

Characteristics of Effective Research Objectives

Characteristics of research objectives include:

• Specific: Research objectives should be clear about the what, why, when, and how of the study.
• Measurable: Research objectives should identify the main variables of the study that can be measured or observed.
• Relevant: Research objectives should be relevant to the research topic and contribute to the overall understanding of the subject.
• Feasible: Research objectives should be achievable within the constraints of time, resources, and expertise available.
• Logical: Research objectives should follow a logical sequence and build upon each other to achieve the overall research goal.
• Observable: Research objectives should be observable or measurable in order to assess the progress and success of the research project.
• Unambiguous: Research objectives should be clear and unambiguous, leaving no room for interpretation or confusion.
• Measurable: Research objectives should be measurable, allowing for the collection of data and analysis of results.

By incorporating these characteristics into research objectives, researchers can ensure that their study is focused, achievable, and contributes to the body of knowledge in their field.

Types of Research Objectives

Research objective can be broadly classified into general and specific objectives. General objectives are broad statements that define the overall purpose of the research. They provide a broad direction for the study and help in setting the context. Specific objectives, on the other hand, are detailed objectives that describe what will be researched during the study. They are more focused and provide specific outcomes that the researcher aims to achieve. Specific objectives are derived from the general objectives and help in breaking down the research into smaller, manageable parts. The specific objectives should be clear, measurable, and achievable. They should be designed in a way that allows the researcher to answer the research questions and address the research problem.

In addition to general and specific objectives, research objective can also be categorized as descriptive or analytical objectives. Descriptive objectives focus on describing the characteristics or phenomena of a particular subject or population. They involve surveys, observations, and data collection to provide a detailed understanding of the subject. Analytical objectives, on the other hand, aim to analyze the relationships between variables or factors. They involve data analysis and interpretation to gain insights and draw conclusions.

Both descriptive and analytical objectives are important in research as they serve different purposes and contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the research topic.

Examples of Research Objectives

Here are some examples of research objectives in different fields:

1. Objective: To identify key characteristics and styles of Renaissance art.

This objective focuses on exploring the characteristics and styles of art during the Renaissance period. The research may involve analyzing various artworks, studying historical documents, and interviewing experts in the field.

2. Objective: To analyze modern art trends and their impact on society.

This objective aims to examine the current trends in modern art and understand how they influence society. The research may involve analyzing artworks, conducting surveys or interviews with artists and art enthusiasts, and studying the social and cultural implications of modern art.

3. Objective: To investigate the effects of exercise on mental health.

This objective focuses on studying the relationship between exercise and mental health. The research may involve conducting experiments or surveys to assess the impact of exercise on factors such as stress, anxiety, and depression.

4. Objective: To explore the factors influencing consumer purchasing decisions in the fashion industry.

This objective aims to understand the various factors that influence consumers’ purchasing decisions in the fashion industry. The research may involve conducting surveys, analyzing consumer behavior data, and studying the impact of marketing strategies on consumer choices.

5. Objective: To examine the effectiveness of a new drug in treating a specific medical condition.

This objective focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of a newly developed drug in treating a particular medical condition. The research may involve conducting clinical trials, analyzing patient data, and comparing the outcomes of the new drug with existing treatment options.

These examples demonstrate the diversity of research objectives across different disciplines. Each objective is specific, measurable, and achievable, providing a clear direction for the research study.

Aligning Research Objectives with Research Questions

Research objectives and research questions are essential components of a research project. Research objective describe what you intend your research project to accomplish. They summarize the approach and purpose of the project and provide a clear direction for the research. Research questions, on the other hand, are the starting point of any good research. They guide the overall direction of the research and help identify and focus on the research gaps .

The main difference between research questions and objectives is their form. Research questions are stated in a question form, while objectives are specific, measurable, and achievable goals that you aim to accomplish within a specified timeframe. Research questions are broad statements that provide a roadmap for the research, while objectives break down the research aim into smaller, actionable steps.

Research objectives and research questions work together to form the ‘golden thread’ of a research project. The research aim specifies what the study will answer, while the objectives and questions specify how the study will answer it. They provide a clear focus and scope for the research project, helping researchers stay on track and ensure that their study is meaningful and relevant.

When writing research objectives and questions, it is important to be clear, concise, and specific. Each objective or question should address a specific aspect of the research and contribute to the overall goal of the study. They should also be measurable, meaning that their achievement can be assessed and evaluated. Additionally, research objectives and questions should be achievable within the given timeframe and resources of the research project. By clearly defining the objectives and questions, researchers can effectively plan and execute their research, leading to valuable insights and contributions to the field.

Guidelines for Writing Clear Research Objectives

Writing research objective is a crucial step in any research project. The objectives provide a clear direction and purpose for the study, guiding the researcher in their data collection and analysis. Here are some tips on how to write effective research objective:

1. Be clear and specific

Research objective should be written in a clear and specific manner. Avoid vague or ambiguous language that can lead to confusion. Clearly state what you intend to achieve through your research.

2. Use action verbs

Start your research objective with action verbs that describe the desired outcome. Action verbs such as ‘investigate’, ‘analyze’, ‘compare’, ‘evaluate’, or ‘identify’ help to convey the purpose of the study.

3. Align with research questions or hypotheses

Ensure that your research objectives are aligned with your research questions or hypotheses. The objectives should address the main goals of your study and provide a framework for answering your research questions or testing your hypotheses.

4. Be realistic and achievable

Set research objectives that are realistic and achievable within the scope of your study. Consider the available resources, time constraints, and feasibility of your objectives. Unrealistic objectives can lead to frustration and hinder the progress of your research.

5. Consider the significance and relevance

Reflect on the significance and relevance of your research objectives. How will achieving these objectives contribute to the existing knowledge or address a gap in the literature? Ensure that your objectives have a clear purpose and value.

6. Seek feedback

It is beneficial to seek feedback on your research objectives from colleagues, mentors, or experts in your field. They can provide valuable insights and suggestions for improving the clarity and effectiveness of your objectives.

7. Revise and refine

Research objectives are not set in stone. As you progress in your research, you may need to revise and refine your objectives to align with new findings or changes in the research context. Regularly review and update your objectives to ensure they remain relevant and focused.

By following these tips, you can write research objectives that are clear, focused, and aligned with your research goals. Well-defined objectives will guide your research process and help you achieve meaningful outcomes.

The Role of Research Objectives in Research Methodology

Research objectives play a crucial role in the research methodology . In research methodology, research objectives are formulated based on the research questions or problem statement. These objectives help in defining the scope and focus of the study, ensuring that the research is conducted in a systematic and organized manner.

The research objectives in research methodology act as a roadmap for the research project. They help in identifying the key variables to be studied, determining the research design and methodology, and selecting the appropriate data collection methods .

Furthermore, research objectives in research methodology assist in evaluating the success of the study. By setting clear objectives, researchers can assess whether the desired outcomes have been achieved and determine the effectiveness of the research methods employed. It is important to note that research objectives in research methodology should be aligned with the overall research aim. They should address the specific aspects or components of the research aim and provide a framework for achieving the desired outcomes.

Understanding The Dynamic of Research Objectives in Your Study

The research objectives of a study play a crucial role in guiding the research process, ensuring that the study is focused, purposeful, and contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field. It is important to note that the research objectives may evolve or change as the study progresses. As new information is gathered and analyzed, the researcher may need to revise the objectives to ensure that they remain relevant and achievable.

In summary, research objectives are essential components in writing an effective research paper . They provide a roadmap for the research process, guiding the researcher in their investigation and helping to ensure that the study is purposeful and meaningful. By understanding and effectively utilizing research objectives, researchers can enhance the quality and impact of their research endeavors.

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Writing the Research Objectives: 5 Straightforward Examples

The research objective of a research proposal or scientific article defines the direction or content of a research investigation. Without the research objectives, the proposal or research paper is in disarray. It is like a fisherman riding on a boat without any purpose and with no destination in sight. Therefore, at the beginning of any research venture, the researcher must be clear about what he or she intends to do or achieve in conducting a study.

How do you define the objectives of a study? What are the uses of the research objective? How would a researcher write this essential part of the research? This article aims to provide answers to these questions.

Table of Contents

Definition of a research objective.

A research objective describes, in a few words, the result of the research project after its implementation. It answers the question,

The research objective provides direction to the performance of the study.

What are the Uses of the Research Objective?

The uses of the research objective are enumerated below:

The research design serves as the “blueprint” for the research investigation. The University of Southern California describes the different types of research design extensively. It details the data to be gathered, data collection procedure, data measurement, and statistical tests to use in the analysis.

The variables of the study include those factors that the researcher wants to evaluate in the study. These variables narrow down the research to several manageable components to see differences or correlations between them.

Specifying the data collection procedure ensures data accuracy and integrity . Thus, the probability of error is minimized. Generalizations or conclusions based on valid arguments founded on reliable data strengthens research findings on particular issues and problems.

In data mining activities where large data sets are involved, the research objective plays a crucial role. Without a clear objective to guide the machine learning process, the desired outcomes will not be met.

How is the Research Objective Written?

A research objective must be achievable, i.e., it must be framed keeping in mind the available time, infrastructure required for research, and other resources.

Before forming a research objective, you should read about all the developments in your area of research and find gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed. Readings will help you come up with suitable objectives for your research project.

5 Examples of Research Objectives

The following examples of research objectives based on several published studies on various topics demonstrate how the research objectives are written:

Finally, writing the research objectives requires constant practice, experience, and knowledge about the topic investigated. Clearly written objectives save time, money, and effort.

Evans, K. L., Rodrigues, A. S., Chown, S. L., & Gaston, K. J. (2006). Protected areas and regional avian species richness in South Africa.  Biology letters ,  2 (2), 184-188.

Yeemin, T., Sutthacheep, M., & Pettongma, R. (2006). Coral reef restoration projects in Thailand.  Ocean & Coastal Management ,  49 (9-10), 562-575.

© 2020 March 23 P. A. Regoniel Updated 17 November 2020 | Updated 18 January 2024

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How to Write Objectives in a Research Proposal

Last Updated: April 30, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Marissa Levis . Marissa Levis is an English Teacher in the Morris County Vocational School District. She previously worked as an English director at a tutoring center that caters to students in elementary and middle school. She is an expert in creating a curriculum that helps students advance their skills in secondary-level English, focusing on MLA formatting, reading comprehension, writing skills, editing and proofreading, literary analysis, standardized test preparation, and journalism topics. Marissa received her Master of Arts in Teaching from Fairleigh Dickinson University. There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 128,800 times.

A research proposal is a detailed outline for a significant research project. They’re common for class assignments, capstone papers, grant applications, and even job applications in some fields, so it's possible you'll have to prepare one at some point. The objectives are a very important part of a research proposal because they outline where the project is headed and what it will accomplish. Developing objectives can be a little tricky, so take some time to consider them. Then work on wording them carefully so your readers understand your goals. With clear objectives, your research proposal will be much stronger.

Brainstorming Your Objectives

• For example, your research question might be “What is the effect of prolonged TV-watching on children?” You can then use that question to build your study around.
• Narrow down your research topic if it’s too broad. A broad research topic makes breaking the objectives down much more difficult. A research question like “How can we save the environment?” is a huge question. Something like “What safety measures would prevent ocean pollution?” is more specific and attainable. [2] X Research source

• Remember that in most cases, you shouldn’t state that your study will prove or disprove something exactly since you haven’t done the work yet. Don’t say “This study proves that honey is not an effective treatment for acne.” Instead, make it something like “This study will demonstrate whether or not honey is an effective treatment for acne.”

• If your research question was “What is the effect of prolonged TV-watching on children?” then there are a few categories you could look at. Objectives wrapped up within that question might be: 1) the incidence of eyestrain among children who watch a lot of TV, 2) their muscular development, 3) their level of socialization with other children. Design your objectives around answering these questions.

• You could always state in your research proposal that you plan to design future experiments or studies to answer additional questions. Most experiments leave unanswered questions and subsequent studies try to tackle them.

• A general objective might be "Establish the effect of diet on mental health." Some specific goals in that project could be 1) Determine if processed foods make depression worse, 2) Identify foods that improve mood, 3) Measure if portion sizes have an impact on mood.
• Not all research proposals want you to divide between general and specific goals. Remember to follow the instructions for the proposal you're writing.

• The best goals align with each letter in the SMART acronym. The weaker ones are missing some letters. For example, you might come up with a topic that’s specific, measurable, and time-bound, but not realistic or attainable. This is a weak objective because you probably can’t achieve it.
• Think about the resources at your disposal. Some objectives might be doable with the right equipment, but if you don’t have that equipment, then you can’t achieve that goal. For example, you might want to map DNA structures, but you can’t view DNA without an electron microscope.
• Ask the same question for your entire project. Is it attainable overall? You don’t want to try to achieve too much and overwhelm yourself.
• The specific words in this acronym sometimes change, but the sentiment is the same. Your objectives should overall be clear and specific, measurable, feasible, and limited by time.

Using the Right Language

• Verbs like use, understand, or study is vague and weak. Instead, choose words like calculate, compare, and assess.
• Your objective list might read like this: 1) Compare the muscle development of children who play video games to children who don’t, 2) Assess whether or not video games cause eyestrain, 3) Determine if videogames inhibit a child’s socialization skills.
• Some proposals use the infinitive form of verbs, like “to measure” or “to determine.” This is also fine but refer to the proposal instructions to see if this is correct.

• You can further explain your objectives further in the research proposal. No need to elaborate a lot when you’re just listing them.
• If you’re having trouble shortening an objective to 1 sentence, then you probably need to split it into 2 objectives. It might also be too complicated for this project.

• For example, “Determine if sunlight is harmful” is too vague. Instead, state the objective as “Determine if prolonged sun exposure increases subjects’ risk of skin cancer.”
• It’s helpful to let someone else read your proposal and see if they understand the objectives. If they’re confused, then you need to be more specific.

• For example, don’t say “Measure the effect of radiation on living tissue.” Instead, say “Determine what level of radiation is dangerous to living tissue.”
• Remember, don’t state the objectives as you’ve already done the experiments. They’re still not answered.

Writing the Objectives

• This is a common format for research proposals, but not universal. Always follow the format that the instructions provided.
• Depending on how long your introduction has to be, you might also list the objectives there. This depends on whether or not you have room.

• At the very least, the abstract should list the general objective. This tells the readers what your study is working towards.

• In some research projects, the general objective is called a long-term goal instead. Adjust your language to the proposal requirements.
• Some proposals directions may just want the specific objectives rather than a division between the general and specific ones. Don’t divide them if the instructions tell you not to.

• Your introduction may be as follows: "My long-term objective with this project is determining whether or not prolonged video-game playing is harmful to children under 5. I will accomplish this aim by meeting the following objectives: 1) Compare the muscle development of children who play videogames to children who don’t 2) Assess whether or not videogames cause eyestrain 3) Determine if videogames inhibit a child’s socialization skills"
• The specific objectives are usually listed as a bullet or numbered points. However, follow the instructions given.

Research Proposal Templates

Expert Q&A

• It’s always a good idea to let someone else read your research proposals and make sure they’re clear. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Proofread! A great proposal could be ruined by typos and errors. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

• Some proposal instructions are very specific, and applicants that don’t follow the format are eliminated. Always follow the instructions given to stay within the requirements. Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0

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• ↑ https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-assets/15490_book_item_15490.pdf
• ↑ https://research-methodology.net/research-methodology/research-aims-and-objectives/
• ↑ https://www.uh.edu/~lsong5/documents/A%20sample%20proposal%20with%20comment.pdf
• ↑ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3282423/
• ↑ https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/evaluation/pdf/brief3b.pdf
• ↑ https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=231&section=8.6.2
• ↑ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6398294/
• ↑ https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0601009.pdf
• ↑ https://www.bpcc.edu/institutional-advancement-grants/how-to-write-goals-and-objectives-for-grant-proposals

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How to Write a Research Proposal: (with Examples & Templates)

Table of Contents

Before conducting a study, a research proposal should be created that outlines researchers’ plans and methodology and is submitted to the concerned evaluating organization or person. Creating a research proposal is an important step to ensure that researchers are on track and are moving forward as intended. A research proposal can be defined as a detailed plan or blueprint for the proposed research that you intend to undertake. It provides readers with a snapshot of your project by describing what you will investigate, why it is needed, and how you will conduct the research.  

Your research proposal should aim to explain to the readers why your research is relevant and original, that you understand the context and current scenario in the field, have the appropriate resources to conduct the research, and that the research is feasible given the usual constraints.  

This article will describe in detail the purpose and typical structure of a research proposal , along with examples and templates to help you ace this step in your research journey.  

What is a Research Proposal ?  

A research proposal¹ ,²  can be defined as a formal report that describes your proposed research, its objectives, methodology, implications, and other important details. Research proposals are the framework of your research and are used to obtain approvals or grants to conduct the study from various committees or organizations. Consequently, research proposals should convince readers of your study’s credibility, accuracy, achievability, practicality, and reproducibility.   

With research proposals , researchers usually aim to persuade the readers, funding agencies, educational institutions, and supervisors to approve the proposal. To achieve this, the report should be well structured with the objectives written in clear, understandable language devoid of jargon. A well-organized research proposal conveys to the readers or evaluators that the writer has thought out the research plan meticulously and has the resources to ensure timely completion.  

Purpose of Research Proposals  

A research proposal is a sales pitch and therefore should be detailed enough to convince your readers, who could be supervisors, ethics committees, universities, etc., that what you’re proposing has merit and is feasible . Research proposals can help students discuss their dissertation with their faculty or fulfill course requirements and also help researchers obtain funding. A well-structured proposal instills confidence among readers about your ability to conduct and complete the study as proposed.  

Research proposals can be written for several reasons:³  

• To describe the importance of research in the specific topic  
• Address any potential challenges you may encounter  
• Showcase knowledge in the field and your ability to conduct a study  
• Apply for a role at a research institute  
• Convince a research supervisor or university that your research can satisfy the requirements of a degree program  
• Highlight the importance of your research to organizations that may sponsor your project  
• Identify implications of your project and how it can benefit the audience  

What Goes in a Research Proposal?    

Research proposals should aim to answer the three basic questions—what, why, and how.  

The What question should be answered by describing the specific subject being researched. It should typically include the objectives, the cohort details, and the location or setting.  

The Why question should be answered by describing the existing scenario of the subject, listing unanswered questions, identifying gaps in the existing research, and describing how your study can address these gaps, along with the implications and significance.  

The How question should be answered by describing the proposed research methodology, data analysis tools expected to be used, and other details to describe your proposed methodology.   

Research Proposal Example  

Here is a research proposal sample template (with examples) from the University of Rochester Medical Center. 4 The sections in all research proposals are essentially the same although different terminology and other specific sections may be used depending on the subject.  

Structure of a Research Proposal  

If you want to know how to make a research proposal impactful, include the following components:¹  

1. Introduction  

This section provides a background of the study, including the research topic, what is already known about it and the gaps, and the significance of the proposed research.  

2. Literature review  

This section contains descriptions of all the previous relevant studies pertaining to the research topic. Every study cited should be described in a few sentences, starting with the general studies to the more specific ones. This section builds on the understanding gained by readers in the Introduction section and supports it by citing relevant prior literature, indicating to readers that you have thoroughly researched your subject.  

3. Objectives  

Once the background and gaps in the research topic have been established, authors must now state the aims of the research clearly. Hypotheses should be mentioned here. This section further helps readers understand what your study’s specific goals are.  

4. Research design and methodology  

Here, authors should clearly describe the methods they intend to use to achieve their proposed objectives. Important components of this section include the population and sample size, data collection and analysis methods and duration, statistical analysis software, measures to avoid bias (randomization, blinding), etc.  

5. Ethical considerations  

This refers to the protection of participants’ rights, such as the right to privacy, right to confidentiality, etc. Researchers need to obtain informed consent and institutional review approval by the required authorities and mention this clearly for transparency.  

6. Budget/funding  

Researchers should prepare their budget and include all expected expenditures. An additional allowance for contingencies such as delays should also be factored in.  

7. Appendices  

This section typically includes information that supports the research proposal and may include informed consent forms, questionnaires, participant information, measurement tools, etc.  

8. Citations  

Important Tips for Writing a Research Proposal  

Writing a research proposal begins much before the actual task of writing. Planning the research proposal structure and content is an important stage, which if done efficiently, can help you seamlessly transition into the writing stage. 3,5  

The Planning Stage  

• Manage your time efficiently. Plan to have the draft version ready at least two weeks before your deadline and the final version at least two to three days before the deadline.
• What is the primary objective of your research?  
• Will your research address any existing gap?  
• What is the impact of your proposed research?  
• Do people outside your field find your research applicable in other areas?  
• If your research is unsuccessful, would there still be other useful research outcomes?  

  The Writing Stage  

• Create an outline with main section headings that are typically used.  
• Focus only on writing and getting your points across without worrying about the format of the research proposal , grammar, punctuation, etc. These can be fixed during the subsequent passes. Add details to each section heading you created in the beginning.   
• Ensure your sentences are concise and use plain language. A research proposal usually contains about 2,000 to 4,000 words or four to seven pages.  
• Don’t use too many technical terms and abbreviations assuming that the readers would know them. Define the abbreviations and technical terms.  
• Ensure that the entire content is readable. Avoid using long paragraphs because they affect the continuity in reading. Break them into shorter paragraphs and introduce some white space for readability.  
• Focus on only the major research issues and cite sources accordingly. Don’t include generic information or their sources in the literature review.  
• Proofread your final document to ensure there are no grammatical errors so readers can enjoy a seamless, uninterrupted read.  
• Use academic, scholarly language because it brings formality into a document.  
• Ensure that your title is created using the keywords in the document and is neither too long and specific nor too short and general.  
• Cite all sources appropriately to avoid plagiarism.  
• Make sure that you follow guidelines, if provided. This includes rules as simple as using a specific font or a hyphen or en dash between numerical ranges.  
• Ensure that you’ve answered all questions requested by the evaluating authority.  

Key Takeaways   

Here’s a summary of the main points about research proposals discussed in the previous sections:  

• A research proposal is a document that outlines the details of a proposed study and is created by researchers to submit to evaluators who could be research institutions, universities, faculty, etc.  
• Research proposals are usually about 2,000-4,000 words long, but this depends on the evaluating authority’s guidelines.  
• A good research proposal ensures that you’ve done your background research and assessed the feasibility of the research.  
• Research proposals have the following main sections—introduction, literature review, objectives, methodology, ethical considerations, and budget.  

Frequently Asked Questions  

Q1. How is a research proposal evaluated?  

A1. In general, most evaluators, including universities, broadly use the following criteria to evaluate research proposals . 6  

• Significance —Does the research address any important subject or issue, which may or may not be specific to the evaluator or university?  
• Content and design —Is the proposed methodology appropriate to answer the research question? Are the objectives clear and well aligned with the proposed methodology?  
• Sample size and selection —Is the target population or cohort size clearly mentioned? Is the sampling process used to select participants randomized, appropriate, and free of bias?  
• Timing —Are the proposed data collection dates mentioned clearly? Is the project feasible given the specified resources and timeline?  
• Data management and dissemination —Who will have access to the data? What is the plan for data analysis?  

Q2. What is the difference between the Introduction and Literature Review sections in a research proposal ?  

A2. The Introduction or Background section in a research proposal sets the context of the study by describing the current scenario of the subject and identifying the gaps and need for the research. A Literature Review, on the other hand, provides references to all prior relevant literature to help corroborate the gaps identified and the research need.  

Q3. How long should a research proposal be?  

A3. Research proposal lengths vary with the evaluating authority like universities or committees and also the subject. Here’s a table that lists the typical research proposal lengths for a few universities.  

Q4. What are the common mistakes to avoid in a research proposal ?  

A4. Here are a few common mistakes that you must avoid while writing a research proposal . 7  

• No clear objectives: Objectives should be clear, specific, and measurable for the easy understanding among readers.  
• Incomplete or unconvincing background research: Background research usually includes a review of the current scenario of the particular industry and also a review of the previous literature on the subject. This helps readers understand your reasons for undertaking this research because you identified gaps in the existing research.  
• Overlooking project feasibility: The project scope and estimates should be realistic considering the resources and time available.   
• Neglecting the impact and significance of the study: In a research proposal , readers and evaluators look for the implications or significance of your research and how it contributes to the existing research. This information should always be included.  
• Unstructured format of a research proposal : A well-structured document gives confidence to evaluators that you have read the guidelines carefully and are well organized in your approach, consequently affirming that you will be able to undertake the research as mentioned in your proposal.  
• Ineffective writing style: The language used should be formal and grammatically correct. If required, editors could be consulted, including AI-based tools such as Paperpal , to refine the research proposal structure and language.  

Thus, a research proposal is an essential document that can help you promote your research and secure funds and grants for conducting your research. Consequently, it should be well written in clear language and include all essential details to convince the evaluators of your ability to conduct the research as proposed.  

This article has described all the important components of a research proposal and has also provided tips to improve your writing style. We hope all these tips will help you write a well-structured research proposal to ensure receipt of grants or any other purpose.  

References  

• Sudheesh K, Duggappa DR, Nethra SS. How to write a research proposal? Indian J Anaesth. 2016;60(9):631-634. Accessed July 15, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5037942/  
• Writing research proposals. Harvard College Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. Harvard University. Accessed July 14, 2024. https://uraf.harvard.edu/apply-opportunities/app-components/essays/research-proposals  
• What is a research proposal? Plus how to write one. Indeed website. Accessed July 17, 2024. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/research-proposal  
• Research proposal template. University of Rochester Medical Center. Accessed July 16, 2024. https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/MediaLibraries/URMCMedia/pediatrics/research/documents/Research-proposal-Template.pdf  
• Tips for successful proposal writing. Johns Hopkins University. Accessed July 17, 2024. https://research.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Tips-for-Successful-Proposal-Writing.pdf  
• Formal review of research proposals. Cornell University. Accessed July 18, 2024. https://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/surveys/survey-assessment-review-group/research-proposals  
• 7 Mistakes you must avoid in your research proposal. Aveksana (via LinkedIn). Accessed July 17, 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-mistakes-you-must-avoid-your-research-proposal-aveksana-cmtwf/  

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Get accurate academic translations, rewriting support, grammar checks, vocabulary suggestions, and generative AI assistance that delivers human precision at machine speed. Try for free or upgrade to Paperpal Prime starting at US$19 a month to access premium features, including consistency, plagiarism, and 30+ submission readiness checks to help you succeed.  

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Writing a Research Paper Introduction | Step-by-Step Guide

Published on September 24, 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on March 27, 2023.

The introduction to a research paper is where you set up your topic and approach for the reader. It has several key goals:

• Present your topic and get the reader interested
• Provide background or summarize existing research
• Position your own approach
• Detail your specific research problem and problem statement
• Give an overview of the paper’s structure

The introduction looks slightly different depending on whether your paper presents the results of original empirical research or constructs an argument by engaging with a variety of sources.

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Table of contents

Step 1: introduce your topic, step 2: describe the background, step 3: establish your research problem, step 4: specify your objective(s), step 5: map out your paper, research paper introduction examples, frequently asked questions about the research paper introduction.

The first job of the introduction is to tell the reader what your topic is and why it’s interesting or important. This is generally accomplished with a strong opening hook.

The hook is a striking opening sentence that clearly conveys the relevance of your topic. Think of an interesting fact or statistic, a strong statement, a question, or a brief anecdote that will get the reader wondering about your topic.

For example, the following could be an effective hook for an argumentative paper about the environmental impact of cattle farming:

A more empirical paper investigating the relationship of Instagram use with body image issues in adolescent girls might use the following hook:

Don’t feel that your hook necessarily has to be deeply impressive or creative. Clarity and relevance are still more important than catchiness. The key thing is to guide the reader into your topic and situate your ideas.

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This part of the introduction differs depending on what approach your paper is taking.

In a more argumentative paper, you’ll explore some general background here. In a more empirical paper, this is the place to review previous research and establish how yours fits in.

Argumentative paper: Background information

After you’ve caught your reader’s attention, specify a bit more, providing context and narrowing down your topic.

Provide only the most relevant background information. The introduction isn’t the place to get too in-depth; if more background is essential to your paper, it can appear in the body .

Empirical paper: Describing previous research

For a paper describing original research, you’ll instead provide an overview of the most relevant research that has already been conducted. This is a sort of miniature literature review —a sketch of the current state of research into your topic, boiled down to a few sentences.

This should be informed by genuine engagement with the literature. Your search can be less extensive than in a full literature review, but a clear sense of the relevant research is crucial to inform your own work.

Begin by establishing the kinds of research that have been done, and end with limitations or gaps in the research that you intend to respond to.

The next step is to clarify how your own research fits in and what problem it addresses.

Argumentative paper: Emphasize importance

In an argumentative research paper, you can simply state the problem you intend to discuss, and what is original or important about your argument.

Empirical paper: Relate to the literature

In an empirical research paper, try to lead into the problem on the basis of your discussion of the literature. Think in terms of these questions:

• What research gap is your work intended to fill?
• What limitations in previous work does it address?
• What contribution to knowledge does it make?

You can make the connection between your problem and the existing research using phrases like the following.

Now you’ll get into the specifics of what you intend to find out or express in your research paper.

The way you frame your research objectives varies. An argumentative paper presents a thesis statement, while an empirical paper generally poses a research question (sometimes with a hypothesis as to the answer).

Argumentative paper: Thesis statement

The thesis statement expresses the position that the rest of the paper will present evidence and arguments for. It can be presented in one or two sentences, and should state your position clearly and directly, without providing specific arguments for it at this point.

Empirical paper: Research question and hypothesis

The research question is the question you want to answer in an empirical research paper.

Present your research question clearly and directly, with a minimum of discussion at this point. The rest of the paper will be taken up with discussing and investigating this question; here you just need to express it.

A research question can be framed either directly or indirectly.

• This study set out to answer the following question: What effects does daily use of Instagram have on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls?
• We investigated the effects of daily Instagram use on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls.

If your research involved testing hypotheses , these should be stated along with your research question. They are usually presented in the past tense, since the hypothesis will already have been tested by the time you are writing up your paper.

For example, the following hypothesis might respond to the research question above:

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The final part of the introduction is often dedicated to a brief overview of the rest of the paper.

In a paper structured using the standard scientific “introduction, methods, results, discussion” format, this isn’t always necessary. But if your paper is structured in a less predictable way, it’s important to describe the shape of it for the reader.

If included, the overview should be concise, direct, and written in the present tense.

• This paper will first discuss several examples of survey-based research into adolescent social media use, then will go on to …
• This paper first discusses several examples of survey-based research into adolescent social media use, then goes on to …

Full examples of research paper introductions are shown in the tabs below: one for an argumentative paper, the other for an empirical paper.

• Argumentative paper
• Empirical paper

Are cows responsible for climate change? A recent study (RIVM, 2019) shows that cattle farmers account for two thirds of agricultural nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands. These emissions result from nitrogen in manure, which can degrade into ammonia and enter the atmosphere. The study’s calculations show that agriculture is the main source of nitrogen pollution, accounting for 46% of the country’s total emissions. By comparison, road traffic and households are responsible for 6.1% each, the industrial sector for 1%. While efforts are being made to mitigate these emissions, policymakers are reluctant to reckon with the scale of the problem. The approach presented here is a radical one, but commensurate with the issue. This paper argues that the Dutch government must stimulate and subsidize livestock farmers, especially cattle farmers, to transition to sustainable vegetable farming. It first establishes the inadequacy of current mitigation measures, then discusses the various advantages of the results proposed, and finally addresses potential objections to the plan on economic grounds.

The rise of social media has been accompanied by a sharp increase in the prevalence of body image issues among women and girls. This correlation has received significant academic attention: Various empirical studies have been conducted into Facebook usage among adolescent girls (Tiggermann & Slater, 2013; Meier & Gray, 2014). These studies have consistently found that the visual and interactive aspects of the platform have the greatest influence on body image issues. Despite this, highly visual social media (HVSM) such as Instagram have yet to be robustly researched. This paper sets out to address this research gap. We investigated the effects of daily Instagram use on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls. It was hypothesized that daily Instagram use would be associated with an increase in body image concerns and a decrease in self-esteem ratings.

The introduction of a research paper includes several key elements:

• A hook to catch the reader’s interest
• Relevant background on the topic
• Details of your research problem

and your problem statement

• A thesis statement or research question
• Sometimes an overview of the paper

Don’t feel that you have to write the introduction first. The introduction is often one of the last parts of the research paper you’ll write, along with the conclusion.

This is because it can be easier to introduce your paper once you’ve already written the body ; you may not have the clearest idea of your arguments until you’ve written them, and things can change during the writing process .

The way you present your research problem in your introduction varies depending on the nature of your research paper . A research paper that presents a sustained argument will usually encapsulate this argument in a thesis statement .

A research paper designed to present the results of empirical research tends to present a research question that it seeks to answer. It may also include a hypothesis —a prediction that will be confirmed or disproved by your research.

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Developing and framing Research Objectives

By charlesworth author services.

• Charlesworth Author Services
• 23 March, 2022

Well-developed and focused research objectives go a long way in ensuring the success of a research project. The objectives even steer and shape the way the resulting research paper is structured . This article explains how to develop and frame your research objectives. Before that, let’s clarify the difference between research aims and objectives.

Research objective vs. research aim

• Focus : A research aim describes the central goal or purpose of the study, broadly indicating what is to be achieved. Objectives specify how it will be achieved. Thus, research objectives divide the main aim into parts and address each part separately. While drafting a dissertation or thesis , the objectives can be used as a reference to establish the structure for the paper’s sections and subsections (or chapters).
• Form : A research aim is expressed as a single sentence or short paragraph , while research objectives are listed out in numbered form (bulleted or in running text). 

Developing research objectives: Process

Let’s look at how you should move from the problem statement to the objectives. (See figure below.)

First, you come up with a problem statement describing the problem that needs solving (a controversy, knowledge gap , aspect that can be improved/enhanced, etc.), along with the rationale , which justifies the study.

You then formulate the central question of the study that is to be answered based on the study findings.

The research hypothesis is the formal prediction that is to be tested.

So, where do the objectives fit in?

The research objectives specify how the research question will be answered; in other words, the objectives determine what is to be measured to test the hypothesis . 

Progression from a problem statement in a broad area of study to the development of the research objectives

Developing research objectives: Pointers

• Objectives guide the choice or development of the necessary methodology for the study.
• The objectives and research questions should be aligned with the overall problem being researched. They are intricately related: the objectives cannot be met without answering the research questions !

Framing research objectives

• Objectives should be ‘ SMART ’:
• Objectives should be stated using action verbs , for example…
• To investigate…
• To explore…
• To ascertain the impact of…
• To compare…
• Objectives should be stated in logical sequence .

Research objective: Example(s)

Here is an example containing multiple research objectives, beginning with a problem statement.

Biodiversity losses are accelerating in the forests of northeast India. While measures are being taken by diverse players to stem these losses, there has been no formal study to quantify or compare the effects of the steps taken.

How do interventions by government research institutes compare with actions by indigenous people in managing plant biodiversity loss in the forests of Meghalaya, India?

Actions and interventions by indigenous people and local communities are more effective than interventions by government research institutes in plant genetic resource conservation in the forests of Meghalaya.

To investigate and compare the impact of the effectiveness of plant genetic resource conservation measures by research institutes and those by indigenous people and local communities in the forests of Meghalaya. To examine the ecological outcomes of specific conservation practices followed by local communities in Meghalaya. To identify specific plant species rescued by local communities in Meghalaya in the last few years.

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How to write Research objectives

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Research Objective Generator for Theses & Papers

Here's how to start using our objective generator for research:

• Choose an action verb from the drop-down list.
• Enter your aim.
• Move the toggle if needed.
• Click “Generate now” and enjoy a properly formulated objective.

In this article, you will find the definition of the research objective, its importance to the scientific paper, and practical tips that’ll help you to create a great one for your research.

• ️✅ The Tool’s Benefits
• ️🎯 Research Objective Basics
• ️✍️ How to Write
• ️✨ Research Objective Tips
• ️🔍 Free Examples
• ️🔗 References

✅ Research Objective Generator: the Benefits

A research objective is a crucial part of your paper that points to purpose of the study. Creating an effective research objective is a challenging task, even for experienced researchers.

Not sure how to do it?

No worries!

Our research objective generator can help you out.

Here are its main advantages:

🎯 Research Objective: the Basics

What is a research objective.

The research objective specifies how you are going to achieve your goal . It’s like a roadmap of your study that summarizes its aims, describes the results you expect to accomplish at the end, and helps you to keep track of your research.

The objective should always appear in the introduction of your paper or scientific article, right after the problem or thesis statement .

Importance of a Research Objective

Find below the list of reasons why a research objective is important.

A good research objective is important because it:

• Describes the scope of your study. It allows you to keep an eye on your findings.
• Establishes the design of your research. It helps to choose the appropriate methods and procedures for data collection and measurement .
• Defines data and factors you need to evaluate. It narrows down your research to several measurable components you have to assess or compare.
• Specifies the contribution of your project to existing research. That’s a great way to show you know the studies conducted in your field and have something valuable to add to them.

✍️ How to Write a Research Objective

To write a strong and clear research objective, follow our three-step guide.

Step 1 - Define the Central Point of Your Research

It’s the first and the most crucial step. Begin with looking through the literature and studies in your area to determine the gaps in existing research . Then, consider how your project can fill these gaps and formulate the primary aim and objective.

Step 2 - Break Down Your Point into Several Objectives

So, you have the primary objective that states what you intend to achieve through your research. Now, it’s time to break it down. Think about what smaller steps you can take to attain your goal. These will be your specific, narrow objectives.

Step 3 - Write Down Your Objectives Using the SMART Format

The SMART format will help you to achieve your goals by keeping them clear and easy to understand.

A SMART objective is:

✨ Research Objective Writing Tips

To formulate effective research objectives, follow these actionable tips:

• Keep them realistic. Ensure you can actually achieve your goals. Make them simple enough to avoid getting overwhelmed.
• Define your goals. You must distinctly understand what issue you are going to solve with your research. For example, you can start by making a list of questions and then using them to formulate your research aims. After you have your goals, think about how you will achieve them—these will be your objectives.
• Use action verbs. Strong action verbs make your objectives measurable and more actionable.
• Proofread your objectives. To make your research competent and reliable, ensure your writing is free of typos and grammar mistakes.
• Ask for feedback. Make a draft of your objectives and ask a peer to review them. That’s a perfect way to ensure your research goals are clear to others.

🔍 Research Objectives Examples

Finally, let’s take a look at some practical examples and review them:

This research aims to analyze the reasons for teenage smoking, identify the change in the smoking rates among teenagers for the last year, and map out actionable solutions to address the issue.

This research aims to assess the influence of flipped classroom learning method on student scores and compare the scores of students exposed to flipped classroom learning method versus the direct instruction method.

This research aims to study the influence of deforestation on the animal species in the sample region in the past 5 years, evaluate the species extinction risk in the area, and propose practical solutions to the problem.

These objectives include strong action verbs (identify, analyze, assess, compare, map out, etc.), time limits, and measurable outcomes. Based on them, the researcher can decide on the methods to use and the variables to measure.

Now, you know everything to create a perfect objective for your research. Go for it! Or you can save your time and use our objective maker for research. It’ll generate a well-formulated research objective just in a few seconds!

If you need to write a thesis statement, try our thesis maker .

❓ Research Objective Generator FAQ

❓ how do you write a smart objective in research.

The first step to writing a SMART objective for your research is to determine your principal aim and consider how you will achieve it. Next, write down your objective and ensure it fits the following criteria: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.

❓ What is a SMART research objective?

A SMART research objective is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. It means that the objective must include a precise, realistic task that is concise with the rest of the research, suppose some definite results, and be finished by a specific time.

❓ What are research objectives examples?

Research objectives show how you will address the aim of your research, for example: "This research aims to indicate the connection between a sedentary lifestyle and muscular atrophy, evaluate the health risks of a sedentary lifestyle, and map out practical solutions to the issue."

❓ What are the 5 SMART goals examples?

To check whether your goals are SMART, ask the following questions:

• What’ll you achieve? (Specific)
• How do you know it’s done? (Measurable)
• Can you do it? (Achievable)
• Is it concise with the study in general? (Relevant)
• When will you accomplish it? (Time-based)

Updated: Jun 5th, 2024

🔗 References

• Research Objectives: Definition and How To Write Them: Indeed
• Research Objectives: OpenLearn
• Formulating Research Aims and Objectives: Oxford University Press
• Defining Goals, Objectives, and Hypotheses: GitLab

• DOI: 10.1016/j.triboint.2024.110046
• Corpus ID: 271520526

Multi-objective optimization and accelerated experimental research on load distribution of planetary roller screw mechanism

• Rui Hu , P. Wei , +4 authors Caichao Zhu
• Published in Tribology International 1 July 2024
• Engineering, Materials Science

46 References

Multi-rollers statics analysis of planetary roller screw mechanism based on explicit expression, effects of eccentric errors on sliding velocity and accumulative wear depth of planetary roller screw mechanism, three-dimensional parametric contact analysis of planetary roller screw mechanism and its application in grouping for selective assembly, incorporating gradient information into dimension perturbation mutation for high-dimensional expensive optimization, a study of precision grinding of micro-pitch internal thread for planetary roller screw mechanism, study on multi-level progressive optimization of planetary roller screw mechanism, time-varying contact characteristics of the planetary roller screw mechanism considering nonuniform surface waviness, an efficient method for designing high-performance planetary roller screw mechanism with low contact stress, surrogate-assisted moea/d for expensive constrained multi-objective optimization, uncertainty analysis and reliability improvement of planetary roller screw mechanism using active learning kriging model, related papers.

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This paper is in the following e-collection/theme issue:

Published on 30.7.2024 in Vol 26 (2024)

Online Medical Consultation Service–Oriented Recommendations: Systematic Review

Authors of this article:

• Hongxun Jiang 1 , PhD   ; 
• Ziyue Mi 1 , MS   ; 
• Wei Xu 1, 2 , PhD  

1 School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

2 School of Smart Governance, Renmin University of China, Suzhou, China

Corresponding Author:

Wei Xu, PhD

School of Information, Renmin University of China

59 Zhongguancun Street

Haidian District

Beijing, 100872

Phone: 86 01082500904

Email: [email protected]

Background: Online health communities have given rise to a new e-service known as online medical consultations (OMCs), enabling remote interactions between physicians and patients. To address challenges, such as patient information overload and uneven distribution of physician visits, online health communities should develop OMC-oriented recommenders.

Objective: We aimed to comprehensively investigate what paradigms lead to the success of OMC-oriented recommendations.

Methods: A literature search was conducted through e-databases, including PubMed, ACM Digital Library, Springer, and ScienceDirect, from January 2011 to December 2023. This review included all papers directly and indirectly related to the topic of health care–related recommendations for online services.

Results: The search identified 611 articles, of which 26 (4.3%) met the inclusion criteria. Despite the growing academic interest in OMC recommendations, there remains a lack of consensus among researchers on the definition of e-service–oriented recommenders. The discussion highlighted 3 key factors influencing recommender success: features, algorithms, and metrics. It advocated for moving beyond traditional e-commerce–oriented recommenders to establish an innovative theoretical framework for e-service–oriented recommenders and addresses critical technical issues regarding 2-sided personalized recommendations.

Conclusions: This review underscores the essence of e-services, particularly in knowledge- and labor-intensive domains such as OMCs, where patients seek interpretable recommendations due to their lack of domain knowledge and physicians must balance their energy levels to avoid overworking. Our study’s findings shed light on the importance of customizing e-service–oriented personalized recommendations to meet the distinct expectations of 2-sided users considering their cognitive abilities, decision-making perspectives, and preferences. To achieve this, a paradigm shift is essential to develop unique attributes and explore distinct content tailored for both parties involved.

Introduction

Technology innovations have brought the medical industry into the digital, networked, and intelligent era of the medical internet. Combined with the impact of the pandemic, telemedicine increasingly prevails. A growing number of patients have started to seek contactless counseling from physicians through online health communities (OHCs). Meanwhile, physicians are providing the public with health care posts, free medical consultations, and even paid customized service [ 1 - 3 ]. HaoDF, one of the leading OHC platforms in China, has gathered >890,000 physicians from 10,000 hospitals across the country up to March 2023. It offers patients the service of telehealth or web-based live chat (ie, online medical consultation [OMC]). Telehealth offers greater convenience to patients than the in-person visits previously available. However, it worsens the problem of information overload, as there are too many candidates for users to choose from, which exacerbates the level of hesitation [ 4 ]. Patients face challenges in selecting suitable physicians due to limited medical knowledge and cognitive abilities. An OMC-oriented recommendation system is crucial to provide patients with professional, accurate, and responsible referrals, ensuring that they connect with qualified and suitable physicians.

Most existing studies of physician recommendations are in the wrong direction regardless of their diverse methodologies, such as collaborative filtering (CF), demographic statistics, or association rules. Previous research has overlooked the fact that OHCs serve both patients and physicians (ie, a 2-sided market scenario). Figure 1 illustrates an OHC jointly formed by patients and physicians. When a market is 2-sided, there are cross-network externalities, which means that the number of users on one side will affect the number of users on the other side and the overall transaction volume on both sides [ 5 ]. An OMC recommendation is a service that an OHC offers to both sides of users. A type of online service such as OMC (ie, an e-service) is an emerging field of internet business under the knowledge economy. As opposed to e-commerce, an e-service is composed of consultees and consultants rather than users and commodities. The offered item is an intangible service rather than a tangible one, but it has to meet the different needs, expectations, and preferences of 2-sided users. Furthermore, medical consultations are knowledge- and labor-intensive services that demand high levels of professionalism and energy investment [ 6 ]. The energy limits of physicians vary, and each physician can receive consultations only to a certain extent. In addition, patients lack the professional knowledge to distinguish the candidates, so they need recommendations that can be interpreted. Thus, it is impossible to transplant an e-commerce recommendation model to solve OMC recommendation cases. Research on recommendation systems suffers from a “blind side” that is the lack of research focusing on service-oriented applications, requiring academicians to develop new attributes and research new content. OMC services demonstrate the typical characteristics of online knowledge services, which represent the emerging trend of the “Internet+” economy. In the context of the knowledge economy, research on service recommendations is particularly pertinent, and now is an excellent time to start. As far as we know, no comprehensive research has been conducted in academic circles on service recommendations. Personalized service recommendation is a new topic yet to be clearly defined and fully explored.

Despite several reviews on health care recommender systems focusing on patient interests [ 7 - 9 ], there remains a gap in service-oriented recommendations. Our systematic review aimed to fill this void by concentrating solely on 2-sided recommendations. By providing the latest review of this domain, we aimed to gather comprehensive evidence for evaluating current studies, identifying successful paradigms and approaches in service-oriented recommendations, and informing public health interventions and policy making. This will leverage 2-sided recommendation technologies to enhance the well-being of both patients and physicians in the emerging OMC service industry.

This review was conducted according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines ( Multimedia Appendix 1 [ 10 ]) [ 11 ].

Search Strategy

As the OMC service–oriented recommendation system spans multiple disciplines such as health care, business information systems, and computer science, the authors conducted separate literature searches in databases from each field. These included 1 medical-focused database (PubMed); 1 computer-focused database (ACM Digital Library); and 2 multidisciplinary full-text databases (SpringerLink and ScienceDirect) from 2 leading publishing groups, Springer and Elsevier, respectively. Our search was tailored to the review topic followed by an analysis of text words found in titles, abstracts, and keywords used in retrieved papers. The electronic search was conducted in December 2023 using keyword combinations in the title, abstract, and keywords fields to ensure comprehensive coverage. Keywords were selected and classified into 4 categories: OMC (subject of the study), recommendation (objective of the study), OHC (fields of the study), and excluded keywords—queries 1 to 4. To emphasize the recent advancements, an additional query 5 set a time limit from January 1, 2001, to November 1, 2023. The overall search strategy was 1 AND 2 AND 3 AND (NOT 4) AND 5. Table 1 presents the hierarchical search query and all keywords.

Following the keyword search, a reference list search (ie, backward reference search) and a cited reference search (ie, forward reference search) were conducted on the full-text articles that met the study selection criteria. Using the results of the backward and forward reference searches, the same study selection criteria were applied to further screen and evaluate articles. We repeated these procedures on all newly identified articles until no additional relevant articles were found.

Eligibility Criteria

The titles and abstracts of identified articles were independently screened by 2 researchers (HJ and ZM) to determine inclusion in the full review. Figure 2 illustrates the paper selection process. If either or both reviewers selected the paper for further evaluation, it was included for full assessment. Articles were considered for analysis if they met at least one of the following criteria: (1) OHC-oriented physician recommendations, (2) coding or documenting of patient preferences, (3) motivations or perceptions of physicians involved in OHCs, (4) implementation of a recommender system for medical services, and (5) recommendation acceptance and interface design in the domain of medical-related recommender systems. Disagreements were resolved with a third reviewer (WX) until consensus was reached. In addition, articles must have met the following three criteria to be considered for analysis: (1) published in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings, excluding research articles without detailed research designs or results; (2) written in English; and (3) published between 2011 and 2023 to align with the recent emergence of OHCs over the last decade.

Quality Assessment

To ensure the quality of the articles, we applied a GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations) framework. The purpose of this initiative is to help individuals make informed decisions using evidence systematically and transparently [ 12 ]. The GRADE Evidence to Decision frameworks have been illustrated and are useful in making and using health-related recommendations and decisions [ 13 ]. They identify 4 levels of evidence for each study: very low, low, moderate, and high. GRADE criteria examine the risk of bias, imprecision, inconsistency, indirectness, and publication bias in evaluating the quality of evidence of a study [ 14 ]. In the scenario of OMC recommendation design, those studies start at high quality of evidence if they use both offline data sets and online data streams for randomized controlled experiments. In contrast, observational studies begin at a lower quality of evidence due to residual confounding. Referring to previous studies [ 15 ], only moderate and high-quality articles were selected to avoid low-quality articles.

Search Results

The electronic database search yielded 599 studies, with an additional 12 studies identified from Google Scholar through reference list and cited reference searches for each obtained study. After removing book chapters and deduplicating entries, 49.3% (301/611) of the studies remained. The review process involved excluding 71.1% (214/301) of ineligible studies after screening titles and abstracts as they did not meet the criteria specific to the theme of physician recommendations, the OMC domain, peer-reviewed sources, or English language. This left 87 studies for full-text review, of which 5 (6%) reports were found to have no full texts and were subsequently removed. The full texts of the remaining 94% (82/87) of the studies were assessed for bias risks and qualitatively analyzed. Ultimately, 21 high-quality studies with adequate outcome data were selected for quantitative analysis. In addition, 5 studies were identified through citation searching and included in the quantitative analysis.

Study Characteristics

Table 2 summarizes the features and discoveries of each of the 26 studies. The number of publications increased over time. This indicates that this field is receiving more and more attention from scholars and practitioners due to the global prosperity of OHCs. This review comprised studies from 6 countries across Asia, Europe, and North America, most of which were low-income countries. The largest source of articles was China, followed by Portugal and India. This reflects that, in countries with less developed offline health networks, online medical services are of particular benefit, as illustrated by the growth of OMCs in China. There were various recommendation algorithms used: analytic hierarchy process, CF, content-based filtering, decision tree, neural network, matrix factorization, and regression analysis. Although research has been conducted using a variety of methods, CF, matrix factorization, and analytic hierarchy process are the top 3 most commonly used ones, with 38% (10/26) of the studies involving their use entirely or in part. However, over the last 5 years, the research methods of graph-based deep learning have become increasingly popular. The most widely used method of data engineering in the field is text analysis, such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and word2vec, followed by knowledge graphs (KGs).

Of the 26 studies included, 13 (50%) used data directly from OHCs as their source, whereas 7 (27%) used data indirectly from the official websites of hospitals or health care centers. Depending on the sources, the data sets could be classified as online or offline. There are numerous OHCs that produce massive amounts of heterogeneous, multimodal, and high-dimensional raw data continuously [ 16 , 17 ]. Online data generated by these OHCs support medical diagnosis and decision-making. Offline data are usually collected from various medical institutions and typically stored in health care information systems. They are exported once permission has been granted [ 18 - 22 ]. In addition, many studies collected primary data through questionnaires directed at patients or physicians [ 23 ]. Depending on the objects described, the data sets could be classified as patient, physician, and institution data, as shown in

Table 3 . The data quality of physician profiles, such as educational background, professional experience, disciplines, and expertise, was high and well defined. The patients were OHC users and service consumers, but they were nonexperts or laypersons in the medical field who usually chat on the web without any restrictions or limitations, which results in poor-quality data from their consultations. This makes data processing and feature extraction quite complicated and challenging.

a CF: collaborative filtering.

b AHP: analytic hierarchy process.

c OHC: online health community.

d Not applicable.

e KOL: key opinion leader.

f LDA: latent Dirichlet allocation.

g BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

h TF-IDF: term frequency–inverse document frequency.

i LASSO: least absolute shrinkage and selection operator.

Data and Feature Engineering

An accurate acquisition of features enables an effective recommendation system, and feature engineering forms the foundation of personalized recommendation systems. Data engineering begins with raw data preprocessing. Duplicate or missing values can be handled by deleting them or using average values. Semistructured data, such as the demographics of physicians or patients, need to be converted into structured data by recognizing named entities and extracting information. When analyzing unstructured data, such as physician-patient consultation records, the content may be nonstandard, repetitive, short, and straightforward. Pycorrector, a third-party open-source library developed by Python, can be used to correct some common errors in oral expression [ 38 ]. Afterward, word separation, deactivation removal, normalization, and other procedures are performed. A word separation process extracts and vectorizes text features. Considering the specificity and professional nature of the medical field, the consultation records contain many medical professional words, and synonymous disease names must be substituted (eg, the term “trisomy 21” indicates a pediatric Down syndrome disorder). To ensure that professional terms are recognized during word segmentation, it is recommended to develop a dictionary based on medical ontologies. Furthermore, medical experts can be consulted to refine the dictionary by deleting terms outside the required domain [ 4 ]. Afterward, stop words should be removed to eliminate meaningless words or characters and reduce noise. For word segmentation, the most commonly used tools are Jieba and WordNet Lemmatizer in the Natural Language Toolkit library; for removing stop words, the most commonly used lexicons include the Harbin Institute of Technology stop word list, the Baidu stop word list, and stop words in the Natural Language Toolkit library.

OMC recommendations also face data sparsity challenges. Domain specialization leads to data sparsity. An OMC is not a domain of fast-moving consumer goods but a professional service. Most people do not consult physicians regularly but rather initiate consultations only when they need one, such as when a condition arises. In most cases, patients will consult only 1 physician for a condition or disease. Once cured, they will not revisit the same physician; otherwise, they will try another physician. In other words, it is rare for a physician and patient to have multiple records of the same condition or disease. Despite OHCs having an extensive collection of physicians, most of those physicians are considered “silent” in the communities as, in most cases, patients pay attention only to those physicians who are well-known and highly regarded. It was only possible for patients to rate or write reviews for physicians they had consulted rather than for other physicians. All these factors contribute to data sparsity.

To alleviate data sparsity, either the model should be improved or more features should be mined. According to the literature [ 30 ], patients’ uncertain characteristics and preferences could be revealed through uncertainty languages, and fuzzy analysis could be used to improve recommender systems’ sparsity problem. KGs have been introduced to represent physician-patient interaction features in the physician recommendation problem, thereby alleviating data sparsity [ 4 ]. A sociosemantic approach was used to address the problem of data sparsity caused by user-based CF [ 43 ]. Son and Choi [ 44 ] used ordinal and binary ratings of experts to refine user opinions and mitigated data sparsity in hand-edited expert recommendations. Wang et al [ 37 ] proposed a matrix decomposition to handle sparse data and improve prediction accuracy.

Medicine is a very specialized field of science. Often, because of cognitive limitations, patients cannot express their conditions and medical histories in consultation content, and some are unable to even express their personal needs. Using topic models, unstructured texts are analyzed for their content to retrieve, classify, cluster, summarize, and find topics that have similarities or relevance. The most common topic modeling method, LDA, uses an unsupervised probabilistic model to generate topics [ 31 ]. Typically, LDA is used to extract topics from large data sets of documents by mining potential semantic relationships between them. Meng and Xiong [ 35 ] used all physician consultations as a corpus for LDA, as shown in Figure 3 , and each physician’s text-topic distribution was then used to train a model to retrieve the corresponding physician for a specific topic. Zhang et al [ 27 ] applied LDA to extract patients’ potential preferences and the characteristics of the physicians they consulted from patient reviews. LDA has some shortcomings. First, LDA lacks semantic contextual information when processing text because the commonly used bag-of-words model ignores it [ 34 ]. Second, LDA models perform poorly when text topics are too sparse to represent potential features; training LDAs tends to overfit if there are too many topics, so a fair number of topics must be selected to strike a balance between the degree of fit and simplicity. Finally, LDA models cannot handle labeled data on documents, causing uninterpretable topics to be generated. From various perspectives, scholars have proposed solutions to the aforementioned drawbacks. Ye et al [ 31 ] reduced the time complexity of LDA via Gibbs sampling and determined the optimal number of LDA topics based on the confusion level. Because the patient’s “initial inquiry” text is usually short and the corresponding topic vector representation is sparse, Liu [ 45 ] used a short text aggregation algorithm to represent the topic vector. Pan and Ni [ 46 ] used a labeled LDA model to generate probability distributions for health questions and topics and topics or words based on the text set of physicians’ answers to health questions.

Sentiment analysis identifies users’ attitudes and opinions on commodities or services from their review texts. In addition to medical topics, consultations and patient evaluations on OHCs include patient emotions and feelings. Using sentiment mining techniques, sentiment information can be extracted from text data. Text sentiment analysis can be divided into 2 main types: lexicon based and deep learning based. Sentiment dictionaries are the traditional tool for analyzing words and short texts’ sentiment tendencies [ 31 ]. These dictionaries describe not only the positive and negative sentiment attributes of words in static dictionaries but also the offsets of sentiment information of words in sentence frameworks. The China National Knowledge Infrastructure, the Information Retrieval Laboratory at Dalian University of Technology, and the Natural Language Processing and Social Humanities Computing Laboratory at Tsinghua University are 3 dictionaries commonly used for sentiment analysis of Chinese texts. On the basis of sentiment dictionaries, Zhang et al [ 27 ] used unsupervised learning methods to calculate the offset between patients’ comments and their sentiments and correct the original patient ratings. There is evidence that deep learning is superior in the analysis of long texts containing complex sentiments. To analyze positive and negative sentiments in patient reviews, Ye et al [ 31 ] used the binary long short-term memory method, which achieved better results than sentiment dictionary analysis. For sentiment polarity analysis in review texts, Wu and Sun [ 47 ] used the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers model, and for recommendation results, they applied the Wilson interval method. Due to the subjective nature of patient comments and the unreliability of sentiment ratings, sentiment mining methods have limitations. Data sources of uneven quality can also affect the accuracy of sentiment evaluations. The fuzzy analysis of the text can help address the uncertainty of text description [ 48 ]. The fuzzy analysis mainly applies fuzzy mathematical or fuzzy linguistic methods, which allow recommender systems to express uncertainty and obtain personalized features from patient comments. Intuitionistic fuzzy numbers serve as effective tools for dealing with fuzzy information (ie, describing the degree of neutrality in uncertain situations). Yang et al [ 32 ] converted raw data into intuitionistic fuzzy numbers to describe uncertainty information by combining the patient’s disease description with comments. Xu et al [ 48 ] examined data based on hesitant fuzzy language multi-criteria preference analysis to enhance patient preferences for physician recommendations.

Recommendation Algorithms

OMCs recommend a service with suitable physicians according to the patients’ needs, an application scenario differing from that of item recommendation in e-commerce and rather resembling expert discovery in online question and answer (Q&A) communities or academic peer review. These recommendations have one thing in common: the recommended subject is not a product but rather a human, a competent and knowledgeable professional. A physician’s expertise can be inferred from their educational and professional background as well as historical consultations, similar to the history of expert responses in Q&A communities or the list of academic papers of a scholar. Patient comments and ratings for a physician are similar to the number of likes for a Q&A expert or citations of a scholar. It can be compared to assigning a competent academic reviewer to a new topic, finding a suitable expert to answer a new question, or recommending an appropriate physician based on graphic descriptions of the patient’s consultation.

Knowledge-Oriented Recommendations

Knowledge-intensive service recommendations are determined by matching large amounts of textual information between patients’ inquiries and physicians’ skill sets. In general, the better the information match, the more likely it is that the service recommendation will be successful. As part of content-based recommendations, physicians’ backgrounds and historical data are gathered, and textual topic techniques are used to mine their expertise, such as LDA, probabilistic latent semantic analysis, and so forth. Pan and Ni [ 46 ] modeled the textual topics of historical consultations and physician responses under each section, mined physician expertise using labeled LDA, and completed physician recommendations based on candidate physician expertise and pending inquiries.

Social network–based expert recommendations have grown in popularity and are derived from a classical algorithm of information retrieval (ie, PageRank). For expert recommendations, Wang et al [ 49 ] proposed a convolutional neural network for answering online expert questions that effectively reduces waiting time for the questioner and improves the quality of the answer. To alleviate the cold-start problem for new-coming patients, physician recommendation–related studies should consider patients with similar conditions in the OHC who exchange information and provide emotional support, as illustrated in Figure 4 . Recently, expert recommendation research has increasingly incorporated integrated models that combine features such as social networks and knowledge content. Xu et al [ 50 ] proposed a scholarly recommendation framework that integrates social network analysis and conceptual semantic analysis in 2 dimensions: social relationships among scholars and information about their expertise. Yang et al [ 51 ] used information about research relevance, personal social networks, and institutional connections to identify the most appropriate experts for collaboration on research. Xu et al [ 52 ] proposed a methodology for a collaborative recommendation that integrates expert expertise and social information in a complex heterogeneous network using heterogeneous network mining. It identifies valuable meta-paths through information gain and uses regularized optimization to generate personalized recommendations tailored to each scholar’s needs. Different recommendation algorithms have different strengths in comparison. Expert recommendations based on knowledge content are better suited for use in enterprises with high levels of information quality and clearly defined knowledge hierarchies. Information quality in OHCs is significantly lower than that in general organizations, and expert recommendations are greatly influenced by the structure of social networks [ 53 ]. Both of these features are present in the OMC service recommendations studied in this review.

A KG is a structured semantic knowledge base that integrates heterogeneous information from multiple sources and represents rich entity relationships using complex networks, which facilitates the storage, processing, and communication of complex real-world knowledge. Medicine is a specialized scientific field, and vector representations of KGs enable algorithms to obtain embeddings of concepts, class hierarchies, entities, and relationships and, in turn, graph structures, paths, and subgraphs. Algorithms can achieve logical reasoning in vector space with the help of ontology embedding and rule learning. For the OHC platform to be credible, physicians must provide their real names, educational backgrounds, professional experience, and expertise so that their profiles can be verified. Using document clustering analysis, LDA topic segmentation, and feature extraction from physician historical consultations, a KG describing physician specialty and expertise can be constructed. Yuan and Deng [ 4 ] produced a more accurate and interpretable recommendation scheme based on the KG to overcome the problem of sparse data. It is common practice for existing studies to extract entities based on physician historical consultations; however, these data alone are not sufficient to represent physician professional specialties. For example, if an otolaryngologist has only received consultations related to the ear and nose for various reasons, then the system only measures their expertise in the ear and nose. However, in practice, they also have excellent expertise in laryngology, which the system cannot calculate. An appropriate recommendation system should be designed to recognize the differences between specific diseases and the expertise of various physicians within the same department. As shown in Figure 5 , the original scope of historical consultations should be extended to include new entity nodes such as specialized disciplines, physicians, and consultations. To optimize the network structure of the KG, we should analyze the semantic connotation of keywords, determine the semantic similarity between consulting cases and their attribution to specialized disciplines, and examine the professional areas of physicians and their evolution trends.

KG-based physician recommendations are a new trend in OMC service recommendations. By using logistic regression, plain Bayesian classification, and noise-immune gate Bayesian networks, Rotmensch et al [ 54 ] constructed a KG, and from the parameter training, a disease-symptom topological relationship graph was generated. Liu [ 45 ] used the k-means algorithm to cluster physicians and generalized goodness-of-fit metrics to evaluate and adjust the clustering results. By comparing the patient’s consultation content with the physician clustering center and the individual physician information in each category, a physician category and physician object that are more closely matched could be recommended. Xu et al [ 52 ] proposed a collaborative recommendation method for scholars based on heterogeneous network mining, combining expert expertise with social information, identifying valuable meta-paths through information gain, and providing personalized recommendations for each scholar through canonical optimization. On the basis of the similarity of consultation texts, Meng and Xiong [ 35 ] constructed a co-occurrence label network of physicians and calculated the centrality of the feature vector to recommend the most important physicians. Gong et al [ 19 ] proposed a hybrid multilayer architecture, iBole, of physician recommendations, mining physician-patient relationships using a time-constrained probabilistic factor graph model and recommending physicians based on random wandering. KG-based physician recommendations also have drawbacks. The OMC service faces more complicated application scenarios involving multiple entities and interentity relationships that reflect a physician’s knowledge or disease-symptom connection. It is difficult to integrate different attributes and relationships between attributes in traditional recommendation methods, and it is nearly impossible to visualize the relationship between each knowledge attribute and physicians. KG-based OMC service recommendations should use multisource heterogeneous information to mine physicians’ comprehensive expertise, take their profiles as basic professional descriptions, mine all their published articles using text semantics, and then combine their historical consultations with multimodal data to extract features using multimodal mining and LDA topic segmentation.

Interpretable Recommendations

As medicine is such a specialized field of science, recommendations must be interpreted according to the patients’ cognitive capacity. It is difficult for patients to make autonomous judgments about the recommendations using their knowledge because they lack theories and relevant experience. Most of the existing research on recommendation systems is devoted to the professional accuracy of recommendation results. It casually ignores the interpretability of recommendation schemes and the lack of transparency in the system computation process [ 4 ]. In other words, the recommendation process and logic are not adequately explained to patients considering their cognitive capabilities. It is very critical for the recommendation system to be interpretable as it directly correlates with the level of trust of patients [ 55 ]. To provide patients with a reference for decision-making, we believe that a good recommendation system for OMC services must incorporate an interpretable and user-friendly recommendation algorithm. As a result, patient acceptance and recognition of the recommendation results will be enhanced, which will ultimately result in a higher acceptance rate of the recommended solution of the system. As a result of their limited cognitive abilities, many patients, in addition to not judging the recommendations, struggle to make their inquiries clear and complete, and in a few cases, they even cannot accurately articulate their personal needs. As an alternative to solving such difficult problems, multimodal data mining techniques may be considered, such as multimodal graphical topic modeling for patient description and consultation needs. Not only can key information from patient consultations be explored and labels can be extracted, but it is also possible to avoid creating too sparse input text variables by avoiding personalized verbal expressions and symptoms. Machine learning algorithms can easily process clustered documents when they are converted into vector distributions.

Recommendation algorithms can be interpreted in light of the rich semantic connections between physicians and patients in the KG [ 4 ]. Some studies have demonstrated that interpretable recommendation algorithms based on KGs enhance the level of patient trust. Using KG-based disease diagnosis algorithms, Wu and Sun [ 47 ] obtained initial disease alternative sets by querying the KG and using the KG embedding model; the KG-structured information was used to enrich the disease alternative set, enhancing the recommendation accuracy and facilitating the recommendation of potential diseases to the user. To identify the different roles of physician-patient interaction characteristics and individual physician characteristics in physician recommendations, Yuan and Deng [ 4 ] developed a deep learning model that can provide accurate and interpretable physician recommendation information by combining layer-by-layer association propagation techniques with deep neural networks. Considering the accuracy, diversity, and interpretability of KG-based recommendations resulting from information such as rich semantic relationships and item links within a network, we propose that interpretable recommendations should be built based on KG path inferences. The algorithm should adopt a knowledge-aware path recurrent network model, which generates path representations by combining the semantics of entities and relations, reasoning by using sequential dependency in paths to infer interaction between users and items, and incorporating a weighted pool into the process of inferring user preferences to differentiate between different contributions from different paths to provide interpretable recommendations.

Physician recommendations can be evaluated online or offline. Online evaluation involves measuring the effectiveness of the recommendation system by obtaining the target users’ evaluation of the recommended object, namely, the rating of the recommended physician by patients. Guo et al [ 26 ] asked 3 faculty members and 3 graduate students with medical backgrounds to judge candidate physicians based on their perception of their professional activities and reputation and use the mean of the ratings to rank them. Ye et al [ 31 ] recruited 18 students with experience in helping relatives choose a physician to consult on the web and asked them to assess the relevance of the physician in response to a given consultation question. Wu and Sun [ 47 ] used a questionnaire to assess the accuracy of a physician’s recommendation and validate the proposed recommendation algorithm, including whether the respondents had had a particular disease, had been treated in the area, and had approved of the physician. An online evaluation has several shortcomings, including a high implementation cost and the difficulty of excluding the characteristics of the group surveyed as well as personal subjective factors from the results. An offline evaluation involves feeding training set data into the system for training the recommendation model and calculating the recommendation results based on test data to measure the performance of the recommendation system. In most cases, machine learning models are trained through supervised learning, which means that the predicted output of the recommendation model is compared with the true value, and based on the difference, model training methods can be altered and parameters can be adjusted to facilitate the continuous optimization of the model [ 53 ]. There are different measurement criteria for the difference between the predicted output of the model and the true value. Offline evaluations are predominantly based on accuracy, which includes classification accuracy, prediction accuracy, and ranking accuracy.

The diversity and coverage of recommended physicians have also been used to evaluate the performance of recommendation algorithms. According to the literature [ 32 ], recommending only similar physicians results in a limited choice for patients and an imbalance in physician use. Patients will be more likely to engage with the recommender system if there is more diversity of recommended physicians. A measure of coverage refers to the proportion of recommended physicians to all physicians [ 56 ]. A low level of coverage indicates that a limited number of physicians are available to patients. Patients are likely to be less satisfied with a recommender system if the candidate pool is limited. However, diversity and coverage metrics are not currently heavily used for evaluating physician recommendation systems. Physician recommendations differ from traditional e-commerce recommendations in some respects. Patients should be recommended physicians with similar expertise or experience that matches their disease conditions rather than a greater variety and number of physicians. Increasing the diversity and coverage of physician recommendations is unfavorable to patient outcomes, thereby affecting the application of these 2 metrics in physician recommendations.

Principal Findings

Personalized recommendation studies have previously focused on commodity recommendations based on “users versus items” and rarely considered service recommendations based on “users versus users.” This paper focused on human carriers who deliver OMC services, particularly when recommending professional services. The OMC service represents a new form of e-business under the knowledge economy as well as a new direction for the development of e-services. Figure 6 shows that a knowledge service–oriented recommendation differs from a traditional commodity-oriented recommendation from a system thinking perspective.

An independent service-oriented recommendation system requires a novel theoretical framework and its key techniques. Table 4 illustrates the comparison between e-commerce and e-service recommendations. First, earlier studies only considered the interests and preferences of the user, not the feelings of the providers recommended; the adoption of an OMC recommendation depends not only on the opinion of the consumer but also on the preference of the service provider. It is impossible to achieve even the so-called “best” recommendation scheme by focusing only on the needs of consumers and ignoring the individual preferences of service providers. Moreover, as the physician is more aware than the patient, they should have a higher priority in terms of decision-making [ 57 ]. Existing personalized recommendation systems have obvious flaws and weaknesses both theoretically and algorithmically even when designed specifically for consulting services. Although the recommended subjects in some expert recommendation system research, such as thesis review, project approval, and other scenarios, are also humans, the recommendation algorithm still focuses on the personalized characteristics of the demand side, analyzing only the professional skills of the experts rather than considering their preferences. These experts are just “tool men.” In the case of e-service recommendation applications such as OMCs, such a research perspective and research conclusions are not applicable. Due to the existence of intrinsic and extrinsic needs of 2-sided users, it is apparent that a new paradigm of personalized recommendation research must be based on a service-oriented approach.

The professional characteristics of the service require that the system provide consumers with explainable recommendations according to their cognitive levels. Medical diagnosis and treatment is a very specialized field. Most patients do not have a very clear understanding of it. The model should be capable of explaining the recommendation schemes so that patients can make informed decisions [ 4 ]. In the case of e-commerce–oriented recommendations, interpretability is not required as users understand the utility of the items and what they desire. Thus, the system simply needs to fully exploit the hidden needs and interests of users. Algorithms focus primarily on collecting users’ side information to identify their potential needs and respond to their individualized preferences [ 58 ]. Due to the consideration of medical privacy in the OMC scenario, the system is unable to extract patients’ hidden medical histories or other information from their historical treatment records [ 30 ]. Furthermore, patients generally lack medical knowledge and are unable to make independent judgments about the recommended results. Having interpretable algorithms improves not only the transparency of the recommendations but also the trust and acceptance of patients, which improves postevent satisfaction with physicians [ 4 ].

OMCs’ particularity is also reflected in its knowledge- and labor-intensive nature. OMCs are professional consultations and intellectually demanding services that involve bilateral interactions between physicians and patients [ 59 ], so physician workload must be carefully considered. Traditional e-commerce–oriented recommendation algorithms typically produce “popular products” or “superstars,” which do not consider the overwork of physicians. In reality, it is impossible to achieve an overloaded recommender scheme regardless of how well the patient’s condition matches the physician’s specialty. A few studies have addressed the “diversity” or “coverage” of recommendations; however, they only increase the total number of item types without considering the frequency of recommendations for a single item. Whenever a human-based service recommendation system is used, the workload problem must be considered, yet it has rarely been taken into account in previous studies.

Data about users are not always valuable. Whether user reviews contribute to the formulation of recommendations is also a difference between OMC scenarios and those of other applications. Several previous studies have attempted to obtain useful information from patient reviews, but these efforts have proven unsuccessful [ 60 , 61 ]. In general, patients are attracted to “popular” physicians with many positive reviews and few moderate and poor reviews, whereas young or unknown physicians are underrepresented, with few respondents and a lack of adequate review data. In total, 3 factors contribute to this phenomenon: patients are unprofessional, physicians are uncooperative, and evaluation of services is difficult. The first challenge is that patients are incapable of evaluating the effectiveness of professional services, and no significant correlation has been found between the online reviews of patients and their clinical outcomes [ 3 ]. Second, physicians will vigorously resist unprofessional, emotional, and malicious reviews that can harm their professional reputation [ 62 ] and may even “vote with their feet” to force the platform to block complaints. Third, the success of OMC services is dependent not only on physicians’ professionalism but also on patients’ perceptions and expectations. In addition, the patient's experience also depends on whether the medical institution where the doctor works can provide advanced medical equipment and a convenient medical environment. Even the ease of use, stability, and privacy security of OHC platforms may have an impact on patients’ evaluations [ 63 ]. Until it has been established what techniques and methods are being used to extract key elements from subjective, ambiguous, and complex patient reviews, e-service–oriented personalized recommendation systems should be cautious about using comments and ratings.

a Not applicable.

2-Sided Preferences

Personalized recommendations are based on user preferences, and acquiring accurate user preferences is key to ensuring their quality [ 29 , 32 ]. In contrast to other recommendations, OMC recommendations need to consider the preferences of both consumers and providers as an OHC is a 2-sided market constituted by both patients and physicians, each with independent and stable preferences. Physician preferences have regrettably been ignored in previous recommendation systems, which has resulted in infeasible recommendations. Malgonde et al [ 5 ] proposed a 2-sided recommendation framework for digital platforms to mitigate user emergence as a commercially complex adaptive system with differential and evolving goals, preferences, and constraints for both sides of a 2-sided market. The patients’ personal preferences influence their selection behavior and, thus, their satisfaction with the recommendations [ 23 , 33 , 38 ]. In turn, the physicians’ preferences influence their willingness to receive consultations, and in turn, the physicians’ onboarding and retention determine the continuity and development of the OHC [ 64 ]. Due to the differences in scale and quality of data between the 2 types of users, patients and physicians should have independent approaches to the extraction of features and the mining of behavioral patterns.

Patient Preferences

Patients’ preferences and needs have been relatively adequately explored in existing studies on physician recommendations. As shown in Table 5 , when choosing a physician, patients typically consider the physician’s disciplinary background, professional competence, and institutional reputation, as well as other factors such as distance, cost, and follow-up care. To provide patients with personalized recommendations, Pan et al [ 29 ] proposed a user preference–learning algorithm to learn patient preferences. Jiang and Xu [ 24 ] proposed an integrated recommendation method that uses hierarchical analysis to screen candidate physicians based on 3 dimensions: semantic matching of physician-patient professional texts, objective evaluation of physician authority, and subjective evaluation of physician online word of mouth. Ye et al [ 65 ] used SPSS to screen patient decision factors and recommend physicians based on their composite scores. Wang et al [ 37 ] even directly used the number of visits as an important determining factor for how patients viewed the standard of care provided by physicians. Xu et al [ 30 ] investigated the privacy issues of patients and provided a multi-indicator group decision–ranking system of physicians.

“Worshipping famous physicians” has become a very common phenomenon among patients. No matter the severity of the patient’s disease, most patients prefer senior physicians from bigger institutions and more reputable practices [ 37 ]. The reputation of a physician is one of their most valuable attributes and plays an important role in patients’ decision-making process [ 67 ]. Generally, physician reputation can be divided into 2 categories: offline and online reputation [ 66 ]. The former is determined by the hospital’s rank, academic title, professional level, the number of years in the field, and the popularity of the physician, and the latter depends on patient evaluations and ratings as well as the number of votes received, acknowledgment letters, online gifts, and other factors. Patients’ cult of famous physicians is largely based on physicians’ offline reputations. Liu et al [ 66 ] found that the ranking of the hospital and the title of the physician had a direct impact on patients’ choices. The higher the title and ranking, the more popular the individual was. Deng et al [ 67 ] also concluded that the title of the physician had a significant impact on the choice of the patient. Patients favored the chief or deputy chief physician over the regular resident physician. In addition, offline reputation can moderate the impact of online reviews on patient choice. Li et al [ 69 ] demonstrated that hospital rank and physician professional credentials negatively moderate the effect of physician online ratings and activity on patient choice. Huang et al [ 72 ] revealed that a physician’s high title negatively moderated the effect on physician service ratings while positively moderating the number of service reviews. Word of mouth in OHCs determines physicians’ online reputation. The experiences of previous patients, reviews, and recommendations are important decision-making aids for newcomers. Deng et al [ 67 ] revealed that the number of views and votes received on physicians’ home pages positively influenced patients’ choice of physician. Gong et al [ 71 ] examined the impact of online reviews and online ratings of physicians on patient decisions from the perspective of trust theory. Li et al [ 69 ] found that positive physician reviews were positively related to a patient’s choice of physician, whereas negative physician reviews played the opposite role, and that negative reviews had a greater impact on a patient’s choice of a physician than positive reviews. Li and Hubner [ 70 ] demonstrated that patients preferred physicians with higher technical skills over those with higher interpersonal skills based on the different dimensions of physician ratings.

Serviceability

With regard to social exchange theory, physicians’ participation in OHCs is a social exchange behavior, and services such as publishing scientific articles, providing OMC services, and offering appointment registration can bring physicians financial and social rewards [ 6 , 72 ]. The quality of a physician’s services is reflected in patients’ online ratings and postevaluations, which in turn influence the decision to choose a physician made by potential patients in the future. Physician service quality in OHCs can be measured by the level of platform activity, engagement, responsiveness, and frequency of updating popular articles. Deng et al [ 67 ] asserted that physicians’ behaviors, such as regular updating of medical information, publication of scientific articles, and answering patients’ questions, can enhance their community reputation, which in turn can attract more patients. Gong et al [ 71 ] noted that updating physicians’ information frequently and providing quality online services were critical to building trust between physicians and patients. Using the number of physician publications of popular articles in OHCs, Li et al [ 69 ] found that physician activeness was positively associated with patient selection.

Affordability

It is also important for patients to consider the time and financial expense of visiting their physician when selecting a physician, preferring an appointment time and location that is convenient for them as well as cost-effective treatment options [ 29 , 32 ]. One of the factors that patients consider when choosing a physician is the location of the physician. Typically, patients consult on the web before consulting offline, and the location of the OMC-receiving physician is related to the convenience of future offline consultations. Ju and Zhang [ 38 ] considered the location of the patient to improve the convenience of combining online consultation with offline treatment. Deveugele et al [ 73 ] analyzed questionnaire data from 6 European countries and studied video recordings of consultations and found that the location of a physician’s hospital affected the length of the online consultation. Compared to geographical location, consultation costs have relatively little impact on patients’ choice of OMC services. Khairat et al [ 74 ] reported that costs were one of the primary factors determining patients’ choice between mobile health and telemedicine. Fletcher et al [ 75 ] also argued that the cost of providing mental health treatment via video at home was significantly lower than the cost of providing in-person care assuming that patients can make use of existing personal technology.

The personal characteristics of a physician, such as their appearance and gender, can also influence patients’ choices. Ouyang and Wang [ 76 ] found that a serious and stable physician appearance image contributes to patients’ trust in physicians, which in turn influences their medical choices. In addition, patients have some stereotypes about physicians’ gender. The gender difference in physicians also extends to the distinction between different departments and medical specialties. Bertakis [ 77 ] found that male and female physicians practice in different ways, with female physicians providing more psychological counseling and preventive services and male physicians focusing more on technical practices such as physical examination. A physician’s gender also influences patient choice. Gong et al [ 71 ] found that physician gender influenced physician ratings and patient choice and that patient choice was enhanced when the physician was male.

Physician Preferences

Continual physician involvement is crucial to the survival, growth, and prosperity of OHCs [ 64 ]. Although patients are consumers of OHCs and physicians are merely providers, the latter are of greater significance and influence. Patients who participate in OHCs seek out famous physicians, and existing OHCs are essentially physician-driven organizations [ 57 ]. In comparison with their counterparts, physicians possess a higher level of cognition and more logical behavior. There is a relatively large amount of data on physicians in current OHCs. By mining behavioral data, it is possible to gain a better understanding of their motivations and expectations. Unfortunately, most previous studies have been primarily concerned with physicians’ fitness from a professional perspective rather than with their willingness and preferences from a drive and reward perspective. Current paradigms of research, which ignore the individualized preferences of the recommended population, are not adequate to meet the growing need for human-based, knowledge-based service recommendations. According to physician motivation theory, we propose a research paradigm to examine how perceptions of personal benefits and costs, satisfaction with individual needs, and cultural differences influence physicians’ OMC decisions. Few studies have examined physicians’ preferences, and more have discussed physicians’ motivation to participate, which influences physicians’ performance in OHCs. Physicians who join OHCs and provide OMC services face both costs and rewards [ 6 ]. A rational decision is based on weighing the costs and benefits. Physicians incur cognitive costs, which include fatigue, pain, and irritability generated by providing knowledge- and labor-intensive services, and implementation costs, which include time, material, and financial costs. Physicians receive a variety of rewards, including both social and economic rewards. The former describes that a physician is respected and valued by their patients for the services they provide in OHCs as well as for fulfilling their own needs and realizing their self-worth, and the latter represents that a physician receives both direct financial gains from OMCs as well as virtual gifts and bonuses from their patients. Financial and social rewards are significant factors influencing physicians’ engagement in OHCs and OMCs. Physicians’ expectations also play a role in the extent of their influence. Figure 7 illustrates how data mining of physicians who participate in OHCs and determining their motivation to participate in OMCs can be carried out. Data collected include but are not limited to academic titles, educational background, career experience, scientific research accomplishments, and case characteristics associated with their historical consultations. The objective of mining these data is to develop a multidimensional preference index system for material motivation, career motivation, and social capital motivation. This will enable us to improve the adoption rate of recommendations and promote a personalized physician recommendation system.

Physicians’ motivations for joining OHCs are remarkable in their diversity. Physicians are concerned not only with financial rewards but also with career planning, professional reputation, and social capital. These considerations include the need for self-worth realization, prestige, social support, and personal branding [ 64 , 78 ]. The needs theory by Maslow [ 79 ] suggests that prestige contributes to self-realization. Social exchange theory also reveals that self-realization, prestige, and social support positively influence physicians’ willingness to provide online services, whereas executive costs negatively impact their willingness to do so. Using expectancy theory, Chen et al [ 64 ] found that both external motivation (eg, external rewards and expected relationships) and intrinsic motivation (ie, a sense of self-worth) positively influenced physicians’ willingness to provide consultation services, whereas consultation time, as a major cost, negatively moderated the relationship between physicians’ willingness to serve and their behavior. Zhou et al [ 80 ] combined mental health–related OHCs with motivation theory and demonstrated that both intrinsic (technical competence) and extrinsic (network reputation and financial rewards) motivations positively influenced psychologists’ voluntary behaviors. Yang et al [ 81 ] suggested that physicians’ contributions to OHCs were positively influenced by both personal and social motivations and physicians’ professional titles moderated this effect, with physicians with high titles emphasizing reputation and physicians with low titles emphasizing monetary rewards. Zhang et al [ 3 ] found that, when physicians reach an advanced level of expertise and knowledge, their material motivation declines and their professional motivation increases. Some physicians place great emphasis on personal branding, and their online services are designed to support their brand positioning and identity. Zhang et al [ 82 ] indicated that the OHC environment impacts brand performance, including trust and reputation, which become more significant factors in determining whether physicians participate in a consultation.

Economic Returns

Most physicians provide OMC services for financial reasons. OHCs need to understand how to improve financial rewards for physicians to retain good physicians. Ren and Ma [ 17 ] investigated the factors influencing physicians’ economic income in OHCs in the context of the pandemic. They found that service quality had a significant positive effect on physicians’ economic returns. In addition, they found that physician teams increase income with disease privacy and physicians who established a team were more likely to earn more money. On OHCs, physicians share articles about health and medicine as well as providing paid OMC services. According to the literature [ 3 ], physicians share free messages due to both material and professional motivation, with the role of material motivation diminishing as physicians gain more expertise. Zhang et al [ 78 ] reported that mutual aid and altruism can positively influence the willingness of health experts to share knowledge. In addition, reputation and self-efficacy can play a greater role than regular users in health experts’ willingness to share knowledge. Yang et al [ 81 ] demonstrated that physicians are motivated to share paid messages for a variety of reasons. External motivation, enjoyment motivation, and professional motivation are all important factors.

Social Rewards

According to the literature [ 16 ], social rewards have less influence on physician motivation than financial rewards. A combination of psychological and material rewards increases physician motivation to participate in OHCs. Material rewards are usually more useful than psychological rewards, but extreme rewards are less effective than moderate rewards. To increase physician retention, OHCs often include gamification elements such as badges, points, and leaderboards. Liu et al [ 83 ] observed that including gamification elements in medical communities can encourage continued participation and increase physician incomes, but on the other hand, gamification elements can also lead to greater income disparities among physicians.

2-Sided Matching

Unlike previous studies, this paper focused on the personalized service recommendation system for 2-sided users. It is not just about providing patients with a list of physicians but also about exploring the overall combination solutions with optimal mutual benefits for both patients and physicians, shown in Figure 8 . Several important issues need to be addressed by researchers in this field, including the adoption of appropriate decision methods that effectively match the interests and preferences of both physicians and patients, improve the adoption rate of recommended solutions, and enhance the satisfaction of 2-sided users [ 84 ]. Xi and Juan [ 84 ] addressed the real problem of matching the supply and demand of health care services under an intelligent platform and proposed a decision-making method that considers both provider’s and consumer’s expectations as well as the psychological characteristics of hesitation and uncertainty. Gao et al [ 85 ] analyzed the problem of matching decisions for medical services in OHCs and constructed a matching decision model that is both satisfactory and stable. Zhong and Bai [ 86 ] analyzed the patient-physician preference matrix and constructed a 2-way matching model for specialty outpatient appointments oriented toward satisfying patients and physicians. Yang et al [ 87 ] used the 2-sided matching theory to design a patient-specialist paired appointment system in which the appointment process and the one-to-many appointment-matching algorithm were described. Chen et al [ 88 ] developed an innovative multi-attribute decision-making method for 2-sided matching considering the psychological behaviors of matching bodies as well as values of aspiration levels and evaluations.

The future research direction of the physician-patient 2-sided matching recommendation system should take into account the decision-making environment of realistic situations. As an example, due to the complexity of medicine and the ambiguity of human thinking, most patients are unable to express clear preference sequences due to their cognitive limitations. By mining consultation text and behavioral characteristics of OHC users, the OMC recommendation system should be able to capture customized preference sequences. Even for physicians, who have higher cognitive levels, more logical behavior, and clearer motivation, there are still situations in which expectation evolution and multiple preferences cannot be ordered. Therefore, the recommendation system must accommodate their intuitive fuzzy preferences. Using intuitive fuzzy preferences, biased order relations can be expressed and preference strengths can be differentiated. Figure 9 illustrates how an intuitionistic fuzzy set matrix is transformed into a satisfaction matrix. The system should then construct a multi-objective optimized, stable 2-sided matching model based on intuitionistic fuzzy number information with the objective of maximizing physician-patient matches, stability, and satisfaction with the matching results.

Workload Balancing

Physicians, as humans, have not only individual drivers and preferences but also variability in load tolerance. The fact that the recommended physicians represent a limited human resource has generally been overlooked in previous studies. Physicians should not overwork, and they should not be overused for an extended period [ 37 ]. Physician overload affects physician fatigue and consultative quality as well as patient waiting time, which deteriorates the comprehensive evaluation of the recommendation system [ 29 ]. Currently, very few studies have explicitly considered the workload of recommended physicians in recommender systems. To address the problem of unbalanced use among physicians, Pan et al [ 29 ] added a balanced use approach (use balancing) to a preference-learning algorithm that included a negative penalty term for physicians whose current use exceeded the mean value. To balance patient preferences and hospital staff workload, Wang et al [ 37 ] developed a utility-diversity trade-off model based on physician capacity, patient preference, and outpatient workload, which had the effect of reducing the workload for highly regarded hospitals and physicians. Yuan and Deng [ 4 ] suggested that limiting the number of times that a physician is recommended could balance the workload while exposing more people to new physicians who could also share the workload. In addition to reducing the workload of chief physicians, Yang et al [ 32 ] increased the number of recommendations to new physicians, which translates to saving time and money for patients. The system could also be used to identify the activity of each physician’s intake based on historical consultations obtained from OHCs, which, we believe, represents a difference in the upper limit of the workload of individual physicians, which is influenced by the physician’s age, specialty department, and the number of offline consultations they have received.

The load balancing of OMC service recommendations is similar to personalized reranking, which generally refers to ranking items in the recommendation result list based on the user’s preference. On the basis of the recommendation results list, load balancing attempts to determine the workload of each recommended physician, adjust the list order, or replace the candidate physicians according to their predefined individual thresholds so that the recommendations are achieved as efficiently as possible. The reranking algorithms typically use 2 categories of indicators. First, they integrate the reranking indicators directly into the recommendation algorithm to train a multi-objective model. Second, heuristics are used to optimize the reranking indicators using a 2-stage approach of filtering and reranking followed by optimization of the load balancing. Among the integrated algorithms, Adomavicius [ 56 ] presented heuristic neighborhood techniques and matrix decomposition techniques to generate a more diverse set of recommendations with a lower workload for each physician. Pedronette and Torres [ 89 ] proposed a method for reordering image content retrieval systems that combined recommendations with clustering and encoding context through ranking lists. Among the 2-stage algorithms, Yu et al [ 90 ] investigated the relationship between recommendation accuracy and diversity and proposed an adaptive trust-aware recommendation model to improve cold-start and long-tail items. In the literature [ 33 ], a dynamic exponential inventory-balancing algorithm for recommendations is presented based on the condition that physician resources are limited in a dynamic environment and based on real-time remaining resources. Wang et al [ 37 ] developed 2 heuristic algorithms for balancing patient preferences and hospital staff workload as well as updating physician rankings without changing physician capabilities so that patients can access more skilled physicians in more hospitals. In summary, the algorithms differ depending on the application scenario. On the basis of mining historical data, we can determine physicians’ work tolerance levels; to optimize recommendation results, we can personalize constraints on physicians’ upper limit of workload and dynamically optimize between patients’ needs and physician energy so that the results are maximized while maintaining the quality of recommendations and reducing the workload of physicians. Using these ideas can reduce the waiting time for patients and ease the strain on physician resources.

Privacy Protection Issues

National legislation to protect user privacy in the health care sector is among the most stringent [ 30 , 80 ]. OMC service recommendations can only use anonymized, scrambled, encrypted, and other technically processed historical data. Consequently, it is difficult to obtain an individual identifier for each patient in the data set, which limits the algorithmic mining of patient features. Furthermore, national regulations regarding the prevention of leakage and misuse of personal information are becoming increasingly strict, and all personalized recommendation systems must and can only conduct legitimate research following user privacy protection [ 63 ]. Technically, CF models are not suitable for OMC recommendation scenarios regardless of whether they are user-based CF or term-based CF. A user is unlikely to seek help on the web unless they are ill or experiencing certain symptoms. Therefore, the specialty of physicians that patients seek is not determined by their explicit or implicit interests but rather by their medical needs at that time. The concept of “inferring future needs from patients’ historical data” is not logical in the context of the OMC service scenario. Unfortunately, some existing studies continue to attempt to mine peripheral information and even private information from patients, which is both illegal and ineffective. Simply reusing CF from e-commerce recommendations and recommending physicians based on historical patient data regardless of medical privacy will ruin personalized e-service recommendations. Xu et al [ 30 ] proposed an effective and privacy-preserving medical service recommendation scheme that identifies patients’ demands with physicians’ information along with their reputation score, and it is considered the first study to develop a physician recommendation scheme that ensures computational efficiency. Similarly, to ensure patient privacy, Narducci et al [ 25 ] constructed a semantic recommendation system that does not link the health data entered by patients to their true identities. As user information is protected by regulations, patient consultations contain only isolated texts and graphics related to disease descriptions. Additional information is lacking, potential preferences are unclear, and invisible needs are not addressed comprehensively. As a means of achieving intelligent recommendations under privacy protection, the system must “dance with shackles on.” To guide personalized preference mining, engineering psychology theories would be better applied, followed by natural semantic processing tools, topic models to refine patient descriptions, and semantic mining to quantify qualitative indicators. Patients’ social networks and multimodal interaction sessions in OHCs would be better collected through this system, as well as identifying potential preferences, qualitative indicators, quantitative indicators, and perceptions of patients through natural language processing, multimodal data analysis, and heterogeneous dynamic network mining.

Contributions and Limitations

Theoretical contributions.

This review highlights a significant gap in research regarding service-oriented recommendations within OHCs. While OMCs are widely used on the internet, there is a notable scarcity of corresponding research on service recommendations within these environments. Traditionally, research on OMC recommendation systems has followed the conventional e-commerce model, focusing on recommending “items” to “users” rather than customizing e-service recommendations, such as recommending “users” to “users.” This lack of focus on personalized service recommendations limits the potential for enhancing user experience within OHCs. Moreover, existing recommendation algorithms primarily focus on mining, modeling, and matching expert knowledge, neglecting the consideration of 2-sided user preferences and the workload of service providers. This oversight can result in recommendations that do not effectively cater to the needs and preferences of both service providers and consumers within OHCs.

Another crucial aspect highlighted in this review is the limited consideration given to the cognitive capabilities of service consumers. Current recommendation algorithms often fail to adequately address the issue that service consumers may lack professional cognitive capabilities. Adopting interpretable recommendation algorithms could help bridge this gap and improve the effectiveness of service recommendations within OHCs. Furthermore, this review emphasizes the importance of using consumer comments judiciously in the recommendation process. While consumer comments can provide valuable insights, they should be analyzed with caution to ensure the reliability and relevance of the recommendations generated.

In summary, research on personalized recommendations for online knowledge services within OHCs is still in its early stages, facing challenges such as the “cold start” problem and the lack of a theoretical framework or algorithm. Addressing these challenges is crucial for advancing the field and enhancing the quality of service recommendations within OHCs.

Practical Enlightenment

The practical implications of the review findings are 2-fold and can greatly benefit stakeholders within OHCs. First, the insights provided by this review can aid OHC stakeholders, including platform administrators and policy makers, in evaluating and optimizing the design of recommender systems. By understanding that service-oriented recommendation systems should function as 2-sided matching systems rather than just expertise retrieval systems, stakeholders can make informed decisions about system design and implementation. This understanding can lead to the promotion of policies that prioritize the consideration of 2-sided preferences, thereby enhancing user satisfaction and engagement within OHCs.

Second, the review findings can assist developers in prioritizing their work and implementing measures to address key challenges faced by OHCs. For instance, developers can focus on enhancing workload balancing for physicians by optimizing recommendation algorithms to consider both the workload of service providers and the preferences of service consumers. In addition, developers can implement measures to protect patient privacy while still providing personalized recommendations, thereby fostering trust and confidence among users.

Overall, the practical value of the review findings lies in their ability to guide stakeholders and developers in optimizing the design and functionality of recommender systems within OHCs, ultimately leading to improved user experiences and outcomes.

Limitations and Future Work

The primary limitation is the relatively small number of included studies, leading to less robust synthesized results. Despite a growing body of research on physician recommendations, there remains a scarcity of strictly designed OMC-oriented recommender systems. Notably, while online medical applications are widely used in China, this review excluded papers published in Chinese due to language constraints.

Conclusions

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in physician recommendations, largely driven by the spread of OHCs and the success of artificial intelligence in other fields. As a result of the emergence of OMCs, an online service, physician recommendations have moved into a new age. These new-generation recommendation systems are service oriented rather than commodity oriented and build on the concept of 2-sided markets. This synergizes both patients and physicians with their needs and preferences individually, inspiring e-service recommendation thinking, vision, paradigms, approaches, and practices. This study has a distinctive pioneering character, and it is expected to open up a new branch of recommendation system theory. The e-service–oriented recommendations demonstrate their transformational, transdisciplinary, and translational features in terms of thinking, paradigms, methodologies, technologies, engineering, and practices. The paradigm shifts and directions are discussed in this paper. Unlike traditional e-commerce recommendations, e-service recommendations emphasize big-picture, outside-the-box thinking as well as data-driven, model-based, 2-sided hypotheses that pursue foundational and original recommendation thinking, theories, and practices from the essence of knowledge- and labor-intensive services inherent in the knowledge economy.

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (grant 23XNL017). This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72271233, 72071203), Suzhou Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Social Governance Technologies (SZS2023007), and Smart Social Governance Technology and Innovative Application Platform (YZCXPT2023101).

Data Availability

The data sets generated during and analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Authors' Contributions

HJ and WX contributed to study conception and design. HJ and ZM collected, analyzed, and interpreted the data. HJ drafted the manuscript, and WX was responsible for its critical revision.

Conflicts of Interest

None declared.

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Abbreviations

Edited by A Mavragani; submitted 10.03.23; peer-reviewed by M Mars, S Pesälä; comments to author 01.11.23; revised version received 22.12.23; accepted 21.05.24; published 30.07.24.

©Hongxun Jiang, Ziyue Mi, Wei Xu. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 30.07.2024.

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