how do you start a research project

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How to Get Started With a Research Project

Last Updated: October 3, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Chris Hadley, PhD . Chris Hadley, PhD is part of the wikiHow team and works on content strategy and data and analytics. Chris Hadley earned his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UCLA in 2006. Chris' academic research has been published in numerous scientific journals. 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 312,959 times.

You'll be required to undertake and complete research projects throughout your academic career and even, in many cases, as a member of the workforce. Don't worry if you feel stuck or intimidated by the idea of a research project, with care and dedication, you can get the project done well before the deadline!

Development and Foundation

• Don't hesitate while writing down ideas. You'll end up with some mental noise on the paper – silly or nonsensical phrases that your brain just pushes out. That's fine. Think of it as sweeping the cobwebs out of your attic. After a minute or two, better ideas will begin to form (and you might have a nice little laugh at your own expense in the meantime).

• Some instructors will even provide samples of previously successful topics if you ask for them. Just be careful that you don't end up stuck with an idea you want to do, but are afraid to do because you know someone else did it before.

• For example, if your research topic is “urban poverty,” you could look at that topic across ethnic or sexual lines, but you could also look into corporate wages, minimum wage laws, the cost of medical benefits, the loss of unskilled jobs in the urban core, and on and on. You could also try comparing and contrasting urban poverty with suburban or rural poverty, and examine things that might be different about both areas, such as diet and exercise levels, or air pollution.

• Think in terms of questions you want answered. A good research project should collect information for the purpose of answering (or at least attempting to answer) a question. As you review and interconnect topics, you'll think of questions that don't seem to have clear answers yet. These questions are your research topics.

• Don't limit yourself to libraries and online databases. Think in terms of outside resources as well: primary sources, government agencies, even educational TV programs. If you want to know about differences in animal population between public land and an Indian reservation, call the reservation and see if you can speak to their department of fish and wildlife.
• If you're planning to go ahead with original research, that's great – but those techniques aren't covered in this article. Instead, speak with qualified advisors and work with them to set up a thorough, controlled, repeatable process for gathering information.

• If your plan comes down to “researching the topic,” and there aren't any more specific things you can say about it, write down the types of sources you plan to use instead: books (library or private?), magazines (which ones?), interviews, and so on. Your preliminary research should have given you a solid idea of where to begin.

Expanding Your Idea with Research

• It's generally considered more convincing to source one item from three different authors who all agree on it than it is to rely too heavily on one book. Go for quantity at least as much as quality. Be sure to check citations, endnotes, and bibliographies to get more potential sources (and see whether or not all your authors are just quoting the same, older author).
• Writing down your sources and any other relevant details (such as context) around your pieces of information right now will save you lots of trouble in the future.

• Use many different queries to get the database results you want. If one phrasing or a particular set of words doesn't yield useful results, try rephrasing it or using synonymous terms. Online academic databases tend to be dumber than the sum of their parts, so you'll have to use tangentially related terms and inventive language to get all the results you want.

• If it's sensible, consider heading out into the field and speaking to ordinary people for their opinions. This isn't always appropriate (or welcomed) in a research project, but in some cases, it can provide you with some excellent perspective for your research.
• Review cultural artifacts as well. In many areas of study, there's useful information on attitudes, hopes, and/or concerns of people in a particular time and place contained within the art, music, and writing they produced. One has only to look at the woodblock prints of the later German Expressionists, for example, to understand that they lived in a world they felt was often dark, grotesque, and hopeless. Song lyrics and poetry can likewise express strong popular attitudes.

Expert Q&A

• Start early. The foundation of a great research project is the research, which takes time and patience to gather even if you aren't performing any original research of your own. Set aside time for it whenever you can, at least until your initial gathering phase is complete. Past that point, the project should practically come together on its own. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• When in doubt, write more, rather than less. It's easier to pare down and reorganize an overabundance of information than it is to puff up a flimsy core of facts and anecdotes. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

• Respect the wishes of others. Unless you're a research journalist, it's vital that you yield to the wishes and requests of others before engaging in original research, even if it's technically ethical. Many older American Indians, for instance, harbor a great deal of cultural resentment towards social scientists who visit reservations for research, even those invited by tribal governments for important reasons such as language revitalization. Always tread softly whenever you're out of your element, and only work with those who want to work with you. Thanks Helpful 8 Not Helpful 2
• Be mindful of ethical concerns. Especially if you plan to use original research, there are very stringent ethical guidelines that must be followed for any credible academic body to accept it. Speak to an advisor (such as a professor) about what you plan to do and what steps you should take to verify that it will be ethical. Thanks Helpful 6 Not Helpful 2

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/research/research_paper.html
• ↑ https://www.nhcc.edu/academics/library/doing-library-research/basic-steps-research-process
• ↑ https://library.sacredheart.edu/c.php?g=29803&p=185905
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/research_papers/choosing_a_topic.html
• ↑ https://www.unr.edu/writing-speaking-center/student-resources/writing-speaking-resources/using-an-interview-in-a-research-paper
• ↑ https://www.science.org/content/article/how-review-paper

About This Article

The easiest way to get started with a research project is to use your notes and other materials to come up with topics that interest you. Research your favorite topic to see if it can be developed, and then refine it into a research question. Begin thoroughly researching, and collect notes and sources. To learn more about finding reliable and helpful sources while you're researching, continue reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Libraries | Research Guides

Start your research, purpose of this guide, develop a research question, decide on sources, locate your resources.

• Tips for Reading and Notetaking
• Course Reserves This link opens in a new window
• Cite Your Sources
• Individual and Group Study Spaces
• Make an Appointment to Meet with a Librarian This link opens in a new window

This tutorial on research methods will help you gain practical skills and knowledge you can apply for all research needs.

Scroll down to learn about:.

• Developing a Research Question : How do you get background knowledge? Develop a thesis? Start searching?
• Deciding on Sources : What's the difference between academic and popular sources, or primary and secondary sources?
• Locating Sources : How do you locate articles, books and literature reviews both from NUL and other academic institutions?
• Tips for Reading and Note-taking : What are different strategies for reading scholarly articles and books?

Have a question or need help? Contact any NUL Subject Specialist Librarian for personal assistance.

• Build Background on your Topic
• Build a Question
• Videos: Choose and Search Keywords

Somewhere in between your initial idea and settling on a research question, you'll need to do background research on how scholars in a particular subject area have discussed your topic. You may find background research in your textbook or class readings, academic books in the library's collection, or reference sources.

The databases below compile reference sources from a variety of disciplines, and they can be a great way to consider how your topic has been studied from different angles.

• Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new window Offers annotated bibliographies of the most important books and articles on specific topics in a growing range of subject areas. Particularly useful for anyone beginning research.
• Oxford Reference Online This link opens in a new window Online version of many Oxford University Press reference works, ranging from specialized dictionaries and companions to major reference works such as the Encyclopedia of Human Rights, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, among many others.
• CQ Researcher Plus Archive This link opens in a new window The CQ Researcher is a collection of reports covering political and social issues, with regular reports on topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy.

Use  NU Search  to browse for books, reference entries, and periodicals to build background information.

After you have an initial project idea, you can think deeper about the idea by developing a "Topic + Question + Significance" sentence. This formula came from Kate Turabian's  Student's Guide to Writing College Papers . Turabian notes that you can use it plan and test your question, but do not incorporate this sentence directly into your paper (p. 13):

TOPIC: I am working on the topic of __________, QUESTION: because I want to find out __________, SIGNIFICANCE: so that I can help others understand __________.

Remember : the shorter your final paper, the narrower your topic needs to be. Having trouble?

• Which specific subset of the topic you can focus on? Specific people, places, or times?
• Is there a cause and effect relationship you can explore?
• Is there something about this topic that is not addressed in scholarship?

Turabian, Kate L.  Student's Guide to Writing College Papers . 4th edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2010.

How do you move from a research question to searching in a database? You first have to pick out keywords from your research question.

• Evaluating Sources
• Academic vs. Popular Publications
• Primary vs. Secondary Sources
• Video: Types of Scholarly Articles

When evaluating a source of information, consider both the content of the source itself and  the context in which the source was created.  

CONTENT 

•  What does it say? What is its main point or argument? Relevance to your topic? What new information, facts, or opinions does it include? 
•  Where did you find it? Where was it published? 
•  When was it written? Within the past few days, weeks, or years? Is it historical? Has its information changed over time? 
•  Who created this information? What are their credentials? 
•  Why does this source exist? Is its purpose to inform, persuade, or entertain? 
•  How does it incorporate data or evidence? What kinds of evidence?

CONTEXT  

•  What is the audience for this source? General readers, people who work in a specific field, academics? Does it assume previous knowledge? 
•  Where can you find other information about this topic? 
•  When was this information last updated? Has it been revised, redacted, or challenged? 
•  Who is missing from the conversation? Does it include opposing viewpoints, marginalized voices, or global perspectives? 
•  Why do you need this information? Is it for an academic assignment, work project, personal decision-making, or to share with others?* 
•  How did the information find you?  Was it through a relevance-ranked search, social media algorithm, advertising cookie, or press release? 

 *Sources that may be appropriate for sharing with others, deepening personal understanding, or decision-making may not be appropriate for an academic assignment or work presentation. When in doubt, check with your librarian or professor for more guidance! 

Adapted from  Beyond the Source  created by the DePaul University Libraries .

Not all "articles" are the same! They have different purposes and different "architecture".

• Original article – information based on original research
• Case reports – usually of a single case
• Technical notes -  describe a specific technique or procedure
• Pictorial essay – teaching article with images
• Review – detailed analysis of recent research on a specific topic
• Commentary – short article with author’s personal opinions
• Editorial – often short review or critique of original articles
• Letter to the Editor – short & on subject of interest to readers

Peh, WCG and NG, KH. (2008) "Basic Structure and Types of Scientific Papers." Singapore Medical Journal , 48 (7) : 522-525.  http://smj.sma.org.sg/4907/4907emw1.pdf  accessed 4/24/19.

• What are the differences between types of articles? "Scholarly articles," "trade journals," "popular magazines," and "newspapers" are all referred to as "articles" - pretty confusing, right?! Check out this table which distinguishes between the different kinds of "articles" that could be useful sources.

Primary sources  provide the raw data you use to support your arguments. Some common types of primary resources include manuscripts, diaries, court cases, maps, data sets, experiment results, news stories, polls, or original research.  One other way to think about primary sources is  the author was there .

Secondary sources  analyze primary sources, using primary source materials to answer research questions.  Secondary sources may analyze, criticize, interpret or summarize data from primary sources. The most common secondary resources are books, journal articles, or reviews of the literature. 

Depending on the subject in which you are doing your research, what counts as a primary or secondary source can vary!  Here are some examples of types of sources that relate to dragons in different disciplines:

There are many types of primary resources, so it is important to define your parameters by:

• Discipline (e.g. art, history, physics, political science)
• Format (e.g. book, manuscript, map, photograph)
• Type of information you need (e.g. numerical data, images, polls, government reports, letters)

Look at the  Primary and Secondary Sources  guide for more clarification on what primary and secondary sources are in different disciplines! 

• Find Articles
• Videos: Books at NU and Other Libraries
• Find Literature Reviews

Northwestern has access to millions of articles not available through Google!

From the library website , enter your keywords into the NUSearch search box. All results with those keywords in the title or description will appear in the search results. Limit your results to "Peer-reviewed Journals" for scholarly articles.

For a more specific search,  go to one of the Libraries' many scholarly databases. If you know the name of your database, find it with  Databases A-Z . Find subject-specific lists of databases in our  Research Guides.

Searching a scholarly database is different from using a Google search. When searching: 

• Use an advanced search, which  allows you to search for multiple keywords. "AND" allows you to enter more than one term in multiple search boxes to focus your search (e.g. apples AND oranges) for articles about both. "OR" broadens your results (e.g. apples OR oranges) for articles about either. 
• The results may link to a full-text version of the article, but if one is not available, the library can likely get it for you! Clicking the "Find it @ NU" button  on the database's left-hand navigation will display other Northwestern databases that may have access to it. If we don't have access to the article, request it through Interlibrary Loan. 

Locating Books

To locate a book, use the NUsearch.  The catalog will tell you the location and call number for retrieval. You can also request for books to be pulled and picked up at the Circulation desk of your choosing.

Borrowing Materials from other Institutions

Need to borrow a book Northwestern does not own or have an article PDF scanned and sent to you? Log into (or create) your interlibrary loan account.  You may also check the status of your interlibrary loan requests here. Contact the Interlibrary Loan Department for more assistance.

• Interlibrary Loan Department

• Annual Reviews The Annual Reviews provide substantially researched articles written by recognized scholars in a wide variety of disciplines that summarize the major research literature in the field. These are often a good place to start your research and to keep informed about recent developments.
• Oxford Handbooks Online Scholarly reviews of research in 15 subject fields including: Archaeology, Business/Management, Classical Studies, Criminology/Criminal Justice, Economics/Finance, History, Law, Linguistics, Literature, Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physical Sciences, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Sociology.

Search for literature review articles in subject databases:

• Type the phrase "Literature Review" (with quotation marks) as a search term OR
• Look to see if there is an option to limit your search results by  Document Type  (this may appear underneath the search box or among the filters on the left side of the search results display).

Be careful The document type "Review" is often used and may identify articles that are book reviews, software reviews or reviews of films, performances, art exhibits, etc.

Need Help? Ask Your Librarian

Created by...

Created and maintained by Instruction & Curriculum Support , with content also developed by Chris Davidson, Jason Kruse, Gina Petersen, and Amy Odwarka (intern, fall 2019). 

• Next: Tips for Reading and Notetaking >>
• Last Updated: May 2, 2024 10:39 AM
• URL: https://libguides.northwestern.edu/start-research

How to write a research plan: Step-by-step guide

Last updated

30 January 2024

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Short on time? Get an AI generated summary of this article instead

Today’s businesses and institutions rely on data and analytics to inform their product and service decisions. These metrics influence how organizations stay competitive and inspire innovation. However, gathering data and insights requires carefully constructed research, and every research project needs a roadmap. This is where a research plan comes into play.

Read this step-by-step guide for writing a detailed research plan that can apply to any project, whether it’s scientific, educational, or business-related.

• What is a research plan?

A research plan is a documented overview of a project in its entirety, from end to end. It details the research efforts, participants, and methods needed, along with any anticipated results. It also outlines the project’s goals and mission, creating layers of steps to achieve those goals within a specified timeline.

Without a research plan, you and your team are flying blind, potentially wasting time and resources to pursue research without structured guidance.

The principal investigator, or PI, is responsible for facilitating the research oversight. They will create the research plan and inform team members and stakeholders of every detail relating to the project. The PI will also use the research plan to inform decision-making throughout the project.

• Why do you need a research plan?

Create a research plan before starting any official research to maximize every effort in pursuing and collecting the research data. Crucially, the plan will model the activities needed at each phase of the research project .

Like any roadmap, a research plan serves as a valuable tool providing direction for those involved in the project—both internally and externally. It will keep you and your immediate team organized and task-focused while also providing necessary definitions and timelines so you can execute your project initiatives with full understanding and transparency.

External stakeholders appreciate a working research plan because it’s a great communication tool, documenting progress and changing dynamics as they arise. Any participants of your planned research sessions will be informed about the purpose of your study, while the exercises will be based on the key messaging outlined in the official plan.

Here are some of the benefits of creating a research plan document for every project:

Project organization and structure

Well-informed participants

All stakeholders and teams align in support of the project

Clearly defined project definitions and purposes

Distractions are eliminated, prioritizing task focus

Timely management of individual task schedules and roles

Costly reworks are avoided

• What should a research plan include?

The different aspects of your research plan will depend on the nature of the project. However, most official research plan documents will include the core elements below. Each aims to define the problem statement , devising an official plan for seeking a solution.

Specific project goals and individual objectives

Ideal strategies or methods for reaching those goals

Required resources

Descriptions of the target audience, sample sizes , demographics, and scopes

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Project background

Research and testing support

Preliminary studies and progress reporting mechanisms

Cost estimates and change order processes

Depending on the research project’s size and scope, your research plan could be brief—perhaps only a few pages of documented plans. Alternatively, it could be a fully comprehensive report. Either way, it’s an essential first step in dictating your project’s facilitation in the most efficient and effective way.

• How to write a research plan for your project

When you start writing your research plan, aim to be detailed about each step, requirement, and idea. The more time you spend curating your research plan, the more precise your research execution efforts will be.

Account for every potential scenario, and be sure to address each and every aspect of the research.

Consider following this flow to develop a great research plan for your project:

Define your project’s purpose

Start by defining your project’s purpose. Identify what your project aims to accomplish and what you are researching. Remember to use clear language.

Thinking about the project’s purpose will help you set realistic goals and inform how you divide tasks and assign responsibilities. These individual tasks will be your stepping stones to reach your overarching goal.

Additionally, you’ll want to identify the specific problem, the usability metrics needed, and the intended solutions.

Know the following three things about your project’s purpose before you outline anything else:

What you’re doing

Why you’re doing it

What you expect from it

Identify individual objectives

With your overarching project objectives in place, you can identify any individual goals or steps needed to reach those objectives. Break them down into phases or steps. You can work backward from the project goal and identify every process required to facilitate it.

Be mindful to identify each unique task so that you can assign responsibilities to various team members. At this point in your research plan development, you’ll also want to assign priority to those smaller, more manageable steps and phases that require more immediate or dedicated attention.

Select research methods

Once you have outlined your goals, objectives, steps, and tasks, it’s time to drill down on selecting research methods . You’ll want to leverage specific research strategies and processes. When you know what methods will help you reach your goals, you and your teams will have direction to perform and execute your assigned tasks.

Research methods might include any of the following:

User interviews : this is a qualitative research method where researchers engage with participants in one-on-one or group conversations. The aim is to gather insights into their experiences, preferences, and opinions to uncover patterns, trends, and data.

Field studies : this approach allows for a contextual understanding of behaviors, interactions, and processes in real-world settings. It involves the researcher immersing themselves in the field, conducting observations, interviews, or experiments to gather in-depth insights.

Card sorting : participants categorize information by sorting content cards into groups based on their perceived similarities. You might use this process to gain insights into participants’ mental models and preferences when navigating or organizing information on websites, apps, or other systems.

Focus groups : use organized discussions among select groups of participants to provide relevant views and experiences about a particular topic.

Diary studies : ask participants to record their experiences, thoughts, and activities in a diary over a specified period. This method provides a deeper understanding of user experiences, uncovers patterns, and identifies areas for improvement.

Five-second testing: participants are shown a design, such as a web page or interface, for just five seconds. They then answer questions about their initial impressions and recall, allowing you to evaluate the design’s effectiveness.

Surveys : get feedback from participant groups with structured surveys. You can use online forms, telephone interviews, or paper questionnaires to reveal trends, patterns, and correlations.

Tree testing : tree testing involves researching web assets through the lens of findability and navigability. Participants are given a textual representation of the site’s hierarchy (the “tree”) and asked to locate specific information or complete tasks by selecting paths.

Usability testing : ask participants to interact with a product, website, or application to evaluate its ease of use. This method enables you to uncover areas for improvement in digital key feature functionality by observing participants using the product.

Live website testing: research and collect analytics that outlines the design, usability, and performance efficiencies of a website in real time.

There are no limits to the number of research methods you could use within your project. Just make sure your research methods help you determine the following:

What do you plan to do with the research findings?

What decisions will this research inform? How can your stakeholders leverage the research data and results?

Recruit participants and allocate tasks

Next, identify the participants needed to complete the research and the resources required to complete the tasks. Different people will be proficient at different tasks, and having a task allocation plan will allow everything to run smoothly.

Prepare a thorough project summary

Every well-designed research plan will feature a project summary. This official summary will guide your research alongside its communications or messaging. You’ll use the summary while recruiting participants and during stakeholder meetings. It can also be useful when conducting field studies.

Ensure this summary includes all the elements of your research project . Separate the steps into an easily explainable piece of text that includes the following:

An introduction: the message you’ll deliver to participants about the interview, pre-planned questioning, and testing tasks.

Interview questions: prepare questions you intend to ask participants as part of your research study, guiding the sessions from start to finish.

An exit message: draft messaging your teams will use to conclude testing or survey sessions. These should include the next steps and express gratitude for the participant’s time.

Create a realistic timeline

While your project might already have a deadline or a results timeline in place, you’ll need to consider the time needed to execute it effectively.

Realistically outline the time needed to properly execute each supporting phase of research and implementation. And, as you evaluate the necessary schedules, be sure to include additional time for achieving each milestone in case any changes or unexpected delays arise.

For this part of your research plan, you might find it helpful to create visuals to ensure your research team and stakeholders fully understand the information.

Determine how to present your results

A research plan must also describe how you intend to present your results. Depending on the nature of your project and its goals, you might dedicate one team member (the PI) or assume responsibility for communicating the findings yourself.

In this part of the research plan, you’ll articulate how you’ll share the results. Detail any materials you’ll use, such as:

Presentations and slides

A project report booklet

A project findings pamphlet

Documents with key takeaways and statistics

Graphic visuals to support your findings

• Format your research plan

As you create your research plan, you can enjoy a little creative freedom. A plan can assume many forms, so format it how you see fit. Determine the best layout based on your specific project, intended communications, and the preferences of your teams and stakeholders.

Find format inspiration among the following layouts:

Written outlines

Narrative storytelling

Visual mapping

Graphic timelines

Remember, the research plan format you choose will be subject to change and adaptation as your research and findings unfold. However, your final format should ideally outline questions, problems, opportunities, and expectations.

• Research plan example

Imagine you’ve been tasked with finding out how to get more customers to order takeout from an online food delivery platform. The goal is to improve satisfaction and retain existing customers. You set out to discover why more people aren’t ordering and what it is they do want to order or experience. 

You identify the need for a research project that helps you understand what drives customer loyalty . But before you jump in and start calling past customers, you need to develop a research plan—the roadmap that provides focus, clarity, and realistic details to the project.

Here’s an example outline of a research plan you might put together:

Project title

Project members involved in the research plan

Purpose of the project (provide a summary of the research plan’s intent)

Objective 1 (provide a short description for each objective)

Objective 2

Objective 3

Proposed timeline

Audience (detail the group you want to research, such as customers or non-customers)

Budget (how much you think it might cost to do the research)

Risk factors/contingencies (any potential risk factors that may impact the project’s success)

Remember, your research plan doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel—it just needs to fit your project’s unique needs and aims.

Customizing a research plan template

Some companies offer research plan templates to help get you started. However, it may make more sense to develop your own customized plan template. Be sure to include the core elements of a great research plan with your template layout, including the following:

Introductions to participants and stakeholders

Background problems and needs statement

Significance, ethics, and purpose

Research methods, questions, and designs

Preliminary beliefs and expectations

Implications and intended outcomes

Realistic timelines for each phase

Conclusion and presentations

How many pages should a research plan be?

Generally, a research plan can vary in length between 500 to 1,500 words. This is roughly three pages of content. More substantial projects will be 2,000 to 3,500 words, taking up four to seven pages of planning documents.

What is the difference between a research plan and a research proposal?

A research plan is a roadmap to success for research teams. A research proposal, on the other hand, is a dissertation aimed at convincing or earning the support of others. Both are relevant in creating a guide to follow to complete a project goal.

What are the seven steps to developing a research plan?

While each research project is different, it’s best to follow these seven general steps to create your research plan:

Defining the problem

Identifying goals

Choosing research methods

Recruiting participants

Preparing the brief or summary

Establishing task timelines

Defining how you will present the findings

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous research faster?

Do you share your research findings with others?

Do you analyze research data?

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How to Start a Research Project: Home

• Video Tutorials

Getting Started

This guide will help you get started with the research process and organize your results in order to manage the many steps involved in doing research.

You may also be interested in the following guides:

• The Research Process: A Suggested Timeline
• Current Events, Opposing Viewpoints, and Controversial Issues
• How To Do A Word Study Without Knowing Hebrew Or Greek
• How to Write an Annotated Bibliography
• How to Write an Exegesis Paper with Library Resources

What's Here?

Step 1: understand the assignment.

Step 2: Choose a Topic

Step 3: Develop a Research Question

Step 4: identify keywords, step 5: develop a search string, step 6: choose the right database, step 7: mark, save, and email your results, step 8: write your paper, step 9: cite your sources, need more help.

Research can be a complex, lengthy, and sometimes intimidating process, but the APU Libraries can help. Librarians are always available to give you customized research suggestions, and you can find books and articles (print and online) via the APU Libraries website .

Subject-Specific Research Assistance

Did you know that there's a librarian who specializes in helping students from your major? Contact your subject librarian for customized help.

Identifying the amount and types of sources your assignment requires will help you choose the right online research tools.

Before you begin developing a strategy for searching the library catalog and databases, you should clarify several things about the assignment:

• What type of assignment is it? (Research paper, essay, opinion paper, review, or other?)
• How long does your paper need to be?
• How many sources do you need for your bibliography?
• What types of information do you need? (Statistics, Web pages, books, articles, images, audio/video clips, or other?)
• Do you need current or historical sources? Or both?

If you are unclear on any of the requirements, ASK YOUR PROFESSOR ASAP ! Doing this early in the semester will save you stress later on and will show your professor that you are proactive.

Step 2: Choose a Topic

Sometimes your topic is assigned by your professor. However, most of the time your professor will give you the freedom to choose your own research topic. Choosing a topic that is specific enough to be manageable without being too narrow can be difficult, but these steps can help.

First, think about what topics might be of interest to you. You can get ideas by skimming your textbook, reading news magazines like Time , or keeping an eye on the news.

Once you've identified a broad topic, looking at a few scholarly reference books (such as dictionaries and encyclopedias) can help you figure out which authors and sources are the most important to know about. Scholarly encyclopedias can also help you discover narrower aspects of your broad topic so that your topic is more manageable.

Often a scholarly reference book will give you a short, authoritative overview of your topic and suggest additional sources for you to read. In essence, reading a reference article can save you time and give you a head-start on your project!

There are two easy ways to find reference material. First, try doing a keyword search of the APU Library Catalog for your topic, limiting your search to the Reference collection (use the drop-down "View Entire Collection" menu and choose "Reference"). Second, try searching for your topic in an online reference database , such as Credo Reference ,  Gale Virtual Reference Library , Oxford Reference Online , or SAGE eReference .

After you've identified and narrowed a research topic, you should re-state it in the form of a research question. Phrasing your topic in the form of a question helps to direct your research process.

Asking whether a fact or statistic directly answers your research question can help you find the most relevant information for your topic. A good research question also leads to a direct answer in the form of a thesis.

A sample research question might be: What are some strategies for improving employee retention among female law enforcement officers?

This question might lead to the following thesis in the final paper: "Recommended strategies for improving employee retention among female law enforcement officers include: flexible benefits and scheduling, diversity training, and..."

A good research question also helps you pull out the different concepts your research will cover. Concepts are discrete ideas that can be researched independently from each other, although most of the time you are looking for research on how multiple concepts interact with each other. Our example, "What are some strategies for improving employee retention among female law enforcement officers?" has 3 distinct concepts:

• Employee retention
• Law enforcement officers

These concepts will become the search keywords you will use in the Library Catalog and online article databases. Keywords are words that appear in the title, table of contents, and other parts of the book or article record in the catalog or database. Keyword searching is different from subject searching, since a keyword search will only return results that exactly match the terms you enter . Searching by subject headings will allow you to pull up books and articles on that topic, regardless of whether or not a particular keyword appears in the record. For more information on subject searching, see our LibGuide on Finding Library Resources by Subject .

Keep in mind that not every author will use the same keywords to describe a topic: one author might write about "police officers," and another might use the phrase "law enforcement officers."

For this reason, you will want to identify some synonyms and related terms for each of your keywords before you start searching. For example:

• Synonyms/related terms: recruitment, promotion, advancement, loyalty
• Synonyms/related terms: women, mothers
• Synonyms/related terms: police, sheriff, cops

Once you've identified your search terms and synonyms, the final pre-search step is to combine those terms into search strings.

To give you the most precise results, online search tools like the library catalog and databases require a specific format for search statements, including the use of words called Boolean operators . Boolean operators are the words AND, OR, and NOT. Placing these words between your search terms will help you find books and articles that are targeted to your research topic.

The Boolean operator AND gives you more targeted results by requiring that two or more terms all appear within the title, abstract, or table of contents of a book or article. Let's imagine we are looking for information on workplace discrimination.

A keyword search in the library catalog for "discrimination" returns 423 titles.

A keyword search for "discrimination AND workplace" returns only 12 titles, but those 12 are much more relevant to our topic.

The Boolean operator OR is the opposite of AND. OR generally gives you more search results by requiring either one term or another to appear in a book or article. OR works best when you are looking for synonyms or related terms.

For example, a keyword search in the library catalog for "recruitment" returns 62 titles.

A keyword search for "recruitment OR retention" returns 141 titles.

A keyword search for "recruitment AND retention" returns 17 titles.

There are 2 types of research sources that can be found through the APU Libraries web site: books and articles.

To find books, use the APU Library Catalog :

To find articles, use a database. This short video from RMIT (an Australian university) can help you understand what library databases contain and how they work:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKIbnNLCh8g&feature=player_embedded

APU subscribes to more than 120 subscription databases , so it can be tricky to find the right one! The easiest way to choose the right database for your topic is to use the subject menu on the "All Databases" page--it will help you find a database recommended for your subject.

Still not sure? A good multidisciplinary database to begin with is Academic Search Premier :

(Search results will open in a new window.)

Once you've started finding books and articles on your topic, be sure to save the information. This will save you time as you organize your notes and start preparing your bibliography.

In the APU Library Catalog , you can download information about the books you find by adding them to your book bag: 

Then, click the "View Bag" button and follow the directions to print, save, or email your records: 

You can also automatically generate an APA, MLA, or Chicago-style citation for the books you find by clicking on the "WorldCat Citations" link from the catalog record:

In online databases , look for buttons or checkbozes to mark your articles or save them in a folder. Then look for print/email/save options; usually you can also choose to have a pre-formatted citation (in APA, MLA, or Chicago style) included in the email or saved file.

If the database you're using does not have a full-text copy of the article you need, click on the "Full Text Finder" button. The Full Text Finder will tell you if there is a copy of the article in another database; if so, it will link you to the full text.

If the Full Text Finder indicates that full text is not available, it will provide you with a link to the ArticleReach service. Click the link to request a free, scanned copy of the article from another library. For more information about ArticleReach, please see our ArticleReach guide .

By this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what your main points are. If you want some help with the writing process , you should schedule an appointment with the APU Writing Center . The writing tutors can give you tips, feedback, and suggestions that can help you write a great paper!

It is important that you cite your information sources correctly in your paper, for several reasons:

• You need to give credit to the original author of your information.
• If you don't cite your sources, you may be accused of plagiarism .
• Providing citations shows your professor that you have devoted time and effort to researching your topic.
• Citations help future readers of your work locate the sources you've used, so that they can build upon the research you've started.

If you need help citing sources, there are several how-to guides available in the LibGuides system.

• Next: Video Tutorials >>
• Last Updated: Sep 26, 2023 9:42 AM
• URL: https://apu.libguides.com/startresearch

Basic Steps in the Research Process

The following steps outline a simple and effective strategy for writing a research paper. Depending on your familiarity with the topic and the challenges you encounter along the way, you may need to rearrange these steps.

Step 1: Identify and develop your topic

Selecting a topic can be the most challenging part of a research assignment. Since this is the very first step in writing a paper, it is vital that it be done correctly. Here are some tips for selecting a topic:

• Select a topic within the parameters set by the assignment. Many times your instructor will give you clear guidelines as to what you can and cannot write about. Failure to work within these guidelines may result in your proposed paper being deemed unacceptable by your instructor.
• Select a topic of personal interest to you and learn more about it. The research for and writing of a paper will be more enjoyable if you are writing about something that you find interesting.
• Select a topic for which you can find a manageable amount of information. Do a preliminary search of information sources to determine whether existing sources will meet your needs. If you find too much information, you may need to narrow your topic; if you find too little, you may need to broaden your topic.
• Be original. Your instructor reads hundreds of research papers every year, and many of them are on the same topics (topics in the news at the time, controversial issues, subjects for which there is ample and easily accessed information). Stand out from your classmates by selecting an interesting and off-the-beaten-path topic.
• Still can't come up with a topic to write about? See your instructor for advice.

Once you have identified your topic, it may help to state it as a question. For example, if you are interested in finding out about the epidemic of obesity in the American population, you might pose the question "What are the causes of obesity in America ?" By posing your subject as a question you can more easily identify the main concepts or keywords to be used in your research.

Step 2 : Do a preliminary search for information

Before beginning your research in earnest, do a preliminary search to determine whether there is enough information out there for your needs and to set the context of your research. Look up your keywords in the appropriate titles in the library's Reference collection (such as encyclopedias and dictionaries) and in other sources such as our catalog of books, periodical databases, and Internet search engines. Additional background information may be found in your lecture notes, textbooks, and reserve readings. You may find it necessary to adjust the focus of your topic in light of the resources available to you.

Step 3: Locate materials

With the direction of your research now clear to you, you can begin locating material on your topic. There are a number of places you can look for information:

If you are looking for books, do a subject search in One Search . A Keyword search can be performed if the subject search doesn't yield enough information. Print or write down the citation information (author, title,etc.) and the location (call number and collection) of the item(s). Note the circulation status. When you locate the book on the shelf, look at the books located nearby; similar items are always shelved in the same area. The Aleph catalog also indexes the library's audio-visual holdings.

Use the library's  electronic periodical databases  to find magazine and newspaper articles. Choose the databases and formats best suited to your particular topic; ask at the librarian at the Reference Desk if you need help figuring out which database best meets your needs. Many of the articles in the databases are available in full-text format.

Use search engines ( Google ,  Yahoo , etc.) and subject directories to locate materials on the Internet. Check the  Internet Resources  section of the NHCC Library web site for helpful subject links.

Step 4: Evaluate your sources

See the  CARS Checklist for Information Quality   for tips on evaluating the authority and quality of the information you have located. Your instructor expects that you will provide credible, truthful, and reliable information and you have every right to expect that the sources you use are providing the same. This step is especially important when using Internet resources, many of which are regarded as less than reliable.

Step 5: Make notes

Consult the resources you have chosen and note the information that will be useful in your paper. Be sure to document all the sources you consult, even if you there is a chance you may not use that particular source. The author, title, publisher, URL, and other information will be needed later when creating a bibliography.

Step 6: Write your paper

Begin by organizing the information you have collected. The next step is the rough draft, wherein you get your ideas on paper in an unfinished fashion. This step will help you organize your ideas and determine the form your final paper will take. After this, you will revise the draft as many times as you think necessary to create a final product to turn in to your instructor.

Step 7: Cite your sources properly

Give credit where credit is due; cite your sources.

Citing or documenting the sources used in your research serves two purposes: it gives proper credit to the authors of the materials used, and it allows those who are reading your work to duplicate your research and locate the sources that you have listed as references. The  MLA  and the  APA  Styles are two popular citation formats.

Failure to cite your sources properly is plagiarism. Plagiarism is avoidable!

Step 8: Proofread

The final step in the process is to proofread the paper you have created. Read through the text and check for any errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Make sure the sources you used are cited properly. Make sure the message that you want to get across to the reader has been thoroughly stated.

Additional research tips:

• Work from the general to the specific -- find background information first, then use more specific sources.
• Don't forget print sources -- many times print materials are more easily accessed and every bit as helpful as online resources.
• The library has books on the topic of writing research papers at call number area LB 2369.
• If you have questions about the assignment, ask your instructor.
• If you have any questions about finding information in the library, ask the librarian.

Contact Information

Craig larson.

Librarian 763-424-0733 [email protected] Zoom:  myzoom   Available by appointment

Get Started

Illustration by James Round

How to plan a research project

Whether for a paper or a thesis, define your question, review the work of others – and leave yourself open to discovery.

by Brooke Harrington   + BIO

is professor of sociology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Her research has won international awards both for scholarly quality and impact on public life. She has published dozens of articles and three books, most recently the bestseller Capital without Borders (2016), now translated into five languages.

Edited by Sam Haselby

Need to know

‘When curiosity turns to serious matters, it’s called research.’ – From Aphorisms (1880-1905) by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Planning research projects is a time-honoured intellectual exercise: one that requires both creativity and sharp analytical skills. The purpose of this Guide is to make the process systematic and easy to understand. While there is a great deal of freedom and discovery involved – from the topics you choose, to the data and methods you apply – there are also some norms and constraints that obtain, no matter what your academic level or field of study. For those in high school through to doctoral students, and from art history to archaeology, research planning involves broadly similar steps, including: formulating a question, developing an argument or predictions based on previous research, then selecting the information needed to answer your question.

Some of this might sound self-evident but, as you’ll find, research requires a different way of approaching and using information than most of us are accustomed to in everyday life. That is why I include orienting yourself to knowledge-creation as an initial step in the process. This is a crucial and underappreciated phase in education, akin to making the transition from salaried employment to entrepreneurship: suddenly, you’re on your own, and that requires a new way of thinking about your work.

What follows is a distillation of what I’ve learned about this process over 27 years as a professional social scientist. It reflects the skills that my own professors imparted in the sociology doctoral programme at Harvard, as well as what I learned later on as a research supervisor for Ivy League PhD and MA students, and then as the author of award-winning scholarly books and articles. It can be adapted to the demands of both short projects (such as course term papers) and long ones, such as a thesis.

At its simplest, research planning involves the four distinct steps outlined below: orienting yourself to knowledge-creation; defining your research question; reviewing previous research on your question; and then choosing relevant data to formulate your own answers. Because the focus of this Guide is on planning a research project, as opposed to conducting a research project, this section won’t delve into the details of data-collection or analysis; those steps happen after you plan the project. In addition, the topic is vast: year-long doctoral courses are devoted to data and analysis. Instead, the fourth part of this section will outline some basic strategies you could use in planning a data-selection and analysis process appropriate to your research question.

Step 1: Orient yourself

Planning and conducting research requires you to make a transition, from thinking like a consumer of information to thinking like a producer of information. That sounds simple, but it’s actually a complex task. As a practical matter, this means putting aside the mindset of a student, which treats knowledge as something created by other people. As students, we are often passive receivers of knowledge: asked to do a specified set of readings, then graded on how well we reproduce what we’ve read.

Researchers, however, must take on an active role as knowledge producers . Doing research requires more of you than reading and absorbing what other people have written: you have to engage in a dialogue with it. That includes arguing with previous knowledge and perhaps trying to show that ideas we have accepted as given are actually wrong or incomplete. For example, rather than simply taking in the claims of an author you read, you’ll need to draw out the implications of those claims: if what the author is saying is true, what else does that suggest must be true? What predictions could you make based on the author’s claims?

In other words, rather than treating a reading as a source of truth – even if it comes from a revered source, such as Plato or Marie Curie – this orientation step asks you to treat the claims you read as provisional and subject to interrogation. That is one of the great pieces of wisdom that science and philosophy can teach us: that the biggest advances in human understanding have been made not by being correct about trivial things, but by being wrong in an interesting way . For example, Albert Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics, but his arguments about it with his fellow physicist Niels Bohr have led to some of the biggest breakthroughs in science, even a century later.

Step 2: Define your research question

Students often give this step cursory attention, but experienced researchers know that formulating a good question is sometimes the most difficult part of the research planning process. That is because the precise language of the question frames the rest of the project. It’s therefore important to pose the question carefully, in a way that’s both possible to answer and likely to yield interesting results. Of course, you must choose a question that interests you, but that’s only the beginning of what’s likely to be an iterative process: most researchers come back to this step repeatedly, modifying their questions in light of previous research, resource limitations and other considerations.

Researchers face limits in terms of time and money. They, like everyone else, have to pose research questions that they can plausibly answer given the constraints they face. For example, it would be inadvisable to frame a project around the question ‘What are the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict?’ if you have only a week to develop an answer and no background on that topic. That’s not to limit your imagination: you can come up with any question you’d like. But it typically does require some creativity to frame a question that you can answer well – that is, by investigating thoroughly and providing new insights – within the limits you face.

In addition to being interesting to you, and feasible within your resource constraints, the third and most important characteristic of a ‘good’ research topic is whether it allows you to create new knowledge. It might turn out that your question has already been asked and answered to your satisfaction: if so, you’ll find out in the next step of this process. On the other hand, you might come up with a research question that hasn’t been addressed previously. Before you get too excited about breaking uncharted ground, consider this: a lot of potentially researchable questions haven’t been studied for good reason ; they might have answers that are trivial or of very limited interest. This could include questions such as ‘Why does the area of a circle equal π r²?’ or ‘Did winter conditions affect Napoleon’s plans to invade Russia?’ Of course, you might be able to make the argument that a seemingly trivial question is actually vitally important, but you must be prepared to back that up with convincing evidence. The exercise in the ‘Learn More’ section below will help you think through some of these issues.

Finally, scholarly research questions must in some way lead to new and distinctive insights. For example, lots of people have studied gender roles in sports teams; what can you ask that hasn’t been asked before? Reinventing the wheel is the number-one no-no in this endeavour. That’s why the next step is so important: reviewing previous research on your topic. Depending on what you find in that step, you might need to revise your research question; iterating between your question and the existing literature is a normal process. But don’t worry: it doesn’t go on forever. In fact, the iterations taper off – and your research question stabilises – as you develop a firm grasp of the current state of knowledge on your topic.

Step 3: Review previous research

In academic research, from articles to books, it’s common to find a section called a ‘literature review’. The purpose of that section is to describe the state of the art in knowledge on the research question that a project has posed. It demonstrates that researchers have thoroughly and systematically reviewed the relevant findings of previous studies on their topic, and that they have something novel to contribute.

Your own research project should include something like this, even if it’s a high-school term paper. In the research planning process, you’ll want to list at least half a dozen bullet points stating the major findings on your topic by other people. In relation to those findings, you should be able to specify where your project could provide new and necessary insights. There are two basic rhetorical positions one can take in framing the novelty-plus-importance argument required of academic research:

• Position 1 requires you to build on or extend a set of existing ideas; that means saying something like: ‘Person A has argued that X is true about gender; this implies Y, which has not yet been tested. My project will test Y, and if I find evidence to support it, that will change the way we understand gender.’
• Position 2 is to argue that there is a gap in existing knowledge, either because previous research has reached conflicting conclusions or has failed to consider something important. For example, one could say that research on middle schoolers and gender has been limited by being conducted primarily in coeducational environments, and that findings might differ dramatically if research were conducted in more schools where the student body was all-male or all-female.

Your overall goal in this step of the process is to show that your research will be part of a larger conversation: that is, how your project flows from what’s already known, and how it advances, extends or challenges that existing body of knowledge. That will be the contribution of your project, and it constitutes the motivation for your research.

Two things are worth mentioning about your search for sources of relevant previous research. First, you needn’t look only at studies on your precise topic. For example, if you want to study gender-identity formation in schools, you shouldn’t restrict yourself to studies of schools; the empirical setting (schools) is secondary to the larger social process that interests you (how people form gender identity). That process occurs in many different settings, so cast a wide net. Second, be sure to use legitimate sources – meaning publications that have been through some sort of vetting process, whether that involves peer review (as with academic journal articles you might find via Google Scholar) or editorial review (as you’d find in well-known mass media publications, such as The Economist or The Washington Post ). What you’ll want to avoid is using unvetted sources such as personal blogs or Wikipedia. Why? Because anybody can write anything in those forums, and there is no way to know – unless you’re already an expert – if the claims you find there are accurate. Often, they’re not.

Step 4: Choose your data and methods

Whatever your research question is, eventually you’ll need to consider which data source and analytical strategy are most likely to provide the answers you’re seeking. One starting point is to consider whether your question would be best addressed by qualitative data (such as interviews, observations or historical records), quantitative data (such as surveys or census records) or some combination of both. Your ideas about data sources will, in turn, suggest options for analytical methods.

You might need to collect your own data, or you might find everything you need readily available in an existing dataset someone else has created. A great place to start is with a research librarian: university libraries always have them and, at public universities, those librarians can work with the public, including people who aren’t affiliated with the university. If you don’t happen to have a public university and its library close at hand, an ordinary public library can still be a good place to start: the librarians are often well versed in accessing data sources that might be relevant to your study, such as the census, or historical archives, or the Survey of Consumer Finances.

Because your task at this point is to plan research, rather than conduct it, the purpose of this step is not to commit you irrevocably to a course of action. Instead, your goal here is to think through a feasible approach to answering your research question. You’ll need to find out, for example, whether the data you want exist; if not, do you have a realistic chance of gathering the data yourself, or would it be better to modify your research question? In terms of analysis, would your strategy require you to apply statistical methods? If so, do you have those skills? If not, do you have time to learn them, or money to hire a research assistant to run the analysis for you?

Please be aware that qualitative methods in particular are not the casual undertaking they might appear to be. Many people make the mistake of thinking that only quantitative data and methods are scientific and systematic, while qualitative methods are just a fancy way of saying: ‘I talked to some people, read some old newspapers, and drew my own conclusions.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. In the final section of this guide, you’ll find some links to resources that will provide more insight on standards and procedures governing qualitative research, but suffice it to say: there are rules about what constitutes legitimate evidence and valid analytical procedure for qualitative data, just as there are for quantitative data.

Circle back and consider revising your initial plans

As you work through these four steps in planning your project, it’s perfectly normal to circle back and revise. Research planning is rarely a linear process. It’s also common for new and unexpected avenues to suggest themselves. As the sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1908 : ‘The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.’ That’s as true of research planning as it is of a completed project. Try to enjoy the horizons that open up for you in this process, rather than becoming overwhelmed; the four steps, along with the two exercises that follow, will help you focus your plan and make it manageable.

Key points – How to plan a research project

• Planning a research project is essential no matter your academic level or field of study. There is no one ‘best’ way to design research, but there are certain guidelines that can be helpfully applied across disciplines.
• Orient yourself to knowledge-creation. Make the shift from being a consumer of information to being a producer of information.
• Define your research question. Your question frames the rest of your project, sets the scope, and determines the kinds of answers you can find.
• Review previous research on your question. Survey the existing body of relevant knowledge to ensure that your research will be part of a larger conversation.
• Choose your data and methods. For instance, will you be collecting qualitative data, via interviews, or numerical data, via surveys?
• Circle back and consider revising your initial plans. Expect your research question in particular to undergo multiple rounds of refinement as you learn more about your topic.

Good research questions tend to beget more questions. This can be frustrating for those who want to get down to business right away. Try to make room for the unexpected: this is usually how knowledge advances. Many of the most significant discoveries in human history have been made by people who were looking for something else entirely. There are ways to structure your research planning process without over-constraining yourself; the two exercises below are a start, and you can find further methods in the Links and Books section.

The following exercise provides a structured process for advancing your research project planning. After completing it, you’ll be able to do the following:

• describe clearly and concisely the question you’ve chosen to study
• summarise the state of the art in knowledge about the question, and where your project could contribute new insight
• identify the best strategy for gathering and analysing relevant data

In other words, the following provides a systematic means to establish the building blocks of your research project.

Exercise 1: Definition of research question and sources

This exercise prompts you to select and clarify your general interest area, develop a research question, and investigate sources of information. The annotated bibliography will also help you refine your research question so that you can begin the second assignment, a description of the phenomenon you wish to study.

Jot down a few bullet points in response to these two questions, with the understanding that you’ll probably go back and modify your answers as you begin reading other studies relevant to your topic:

• What will be the general topic of your paper?
• What will be the specific topic of your paper?

b) Research question(s)

Use the following guidelines to frame a research question – or questions – that will drive your analysis. As with Part 1 above, you’ll probably find it necessary to change or refine your research question(s) as you complete future assignments.

• Your question should be phrased so that it can’t be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
• Your question should have more than one plausible answer.
• Your question should draw relationships between two or more concepts; framing the question in terms of How? or What? often works better than asking Why ?

c) Annotated bibliography

Most or all of your background information should come from two sources: scholarly books and journals, or reputable mass media sources. You might be able to access journal articles electronically through your library, using search engines such as JSTOR and Google Scholar. This can save you a great deal of time compared with going to the library in person to search periodicals. General news sources, such as those accessible through LexisNexis, are acceptable, but should be cited sparingly, since they don’t carry the same level of credibility as scholarly sources. As discussed above, unvetted sources such as blogs and Wikipedia should be avoided, because the quality of the information they provide is unreliable and often misleading.

To create an annotated bibliography, provide the following information for at least 10 sources relevant to your specific topic, using the format suggested below.

Name of author(s):

Publication date:

Title of book, chapter, or article:

If a chapter or article, title of journal or book where they appear:

Brief description of this work, including main findings and methods ( c 75 words):

Summary of how this work contributes to your project ( c 75 words):

Brief description of the implications of this work ( c 25 words):

Identify any gap or controversy in knowledge this work points up, and how your project could address those problems ( c 50 words):

Exercise 2: Towards an analysis

Develop a short statement ( c 250 words) about the kind of data that would be useful to address your research question, and how you’d analyse it. Some questions to consider in writing this statement include:

• What are the central concepts or variables in your project? Offer a brief definition of each.
• Do any data sources exist on those concepts or variables, or would you need to collect data?
• Of the analytical strategies you could apply to that data, which would be the most appropriate to answer your question? Which would be the most feasible for you? Consider at least two methods, noting their advantages or disadvantages for your project.

Links & books

One of the best texts ever written about planning and executing research comes from a source that might be unexpected: a 60-year-old work on urban planning by a self-trained scholar. The classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) by Jane Jacobs (available complete and free of charge via this link ) is worth reading in its entirety just for the pleasure of it. But the final 20 pages – a concluding chapter titled ‘The Kind of Problem a City Is’ – are really about the process of thinking through and investigating a problem. Highly recommended as a window into the craft of research.

Jacobs’s text references an essay on advancing human knowledge by the mathematician Warren Weaver. At the time, Weaver was director of the Rockefeller Foundation, in charge of funding basic research in the natural and medical sciences. Although the essay is titled ‘A Quarter Century in the Natural Sciences’ (1960) and appears at first blush to be merely a summation of one man’s career, it turns out to be something much bigger and more interesting: a meditation on the history of human beings seeking answers to big questions about the world. Weaver goes back to the 17th century to trace the origins of systematic research thinking, with enthusiasm and vivid anecdotes that make the process come alive. The essay is worth reading in its entirety, and is available free of charge via this link .

For those seeking a more in-depth, professional-level discussion of the logic of research design, the political scientist Harvey Starr provides insight in a compact format in the article ‘Cumulation from Proper Specification: Theory, Logic, Research Design, and “Nice” Laws’ (2005). Starr reviews the ‘research triad’, consisting of the interlinked considerations of formulating a question, selecting relevant theories and applying appropriate methods. The full text of the article, published in the scholarly journal Conflict Management and Peace Science , is available, free of charge, via this link .

Finally, the book Getting What You Came For (1992) by Robert Peters is not only an outstanding guide for anyone contemplating graduate school – from the application process onward – but it also includes several excellent chapters on planning and executing research, applicable across a wide variety of subject areas. It was an invaluable resource for me 25 years ago, and it remains in print with good reason; I recommend it to all my students, particularly Chapter 16 (‘The Thesis Topic: Finding It’), Chapter 17 (‘The Thesis Proposal’) and Chapter 18 (‘The Thesis: Writing It’).

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How to Do Your Research Project: A Guide for Students

Student resources, welcome to the digital roadmap and resources.

Work your way through  interactive exercises  for each stage of the research project roadmap and watch  videos   from your pocket supervisor, Gary Thomas. Explore real-world practice through  case studies   and  journal articles . Reflect, revise, and take your learning on the go with  worksheets  and get to grips with key terms and concepts using digital  flashcards .

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How to Set Up a Research Project (in 6 Steps)

Written by Casey Scott-Songin

Research projects, 0 comment(s).

It can be really exciting to embark on a research project, but knowing where to start can feel overwhelming! Setting up a research project properly means that you will save yourself a lot of stress, worrying about whether you’ll collect useful information, and will save you time analysing results!

Before you even begin to think about what research method you should use or where to recruit participants , you need to think about the purpose, objectives, and key research questions for your project. Below are the six steps to starting a research project that you can be confident in!

1. Define your purpose

The first thing you need to do is have a clear understanding of the purpose of your project. If you had to summarise why you wanted to do this project in two to three sentences, what would they be?

These should include:

• what problem you are trying to solve
• the context for that problem
• the purpose of the project

The problem you are trying to solve

Think about how to summarise your main problem in one sentence.  Is it that your product is not selling? Are you not sure why some ads are more successful than others? Is it that you are struggling to grow you client list? Or maybe There is a high bounce rate on a particular page on your website. Whatever it is, clearly identify it in one sentence (okay, two sentences maximum). 

The context for that problem

This is the opportunity to think about what you already know. This should be a summary of what data or research you already have access to. This could include analytics from your website or social media pages, previous qualitative research you may have done, or sector or industry research you have access to. Basically, this is the data that has helped you realise you had a problem to begin with. Knowing where you are starting from will help you significantly when you finish your research because you’ll have a clear understanding of where you are coming from in order to define where you want to be in the future.

The purpose of the project

This should be a sentence about why you decided to do this research project in the first place. If you are working with stakeholders and will be using this to get research approved, this sentence should be your commitment that research can help solve the problem you have identified.

2. Clarify your Objectives

This section should focus on what the research will add to the overall project. It should clearly identify the goals you want to achieve by the end of the research project. Try to focus on one or two goals maximum. You will know you have succeeded at the end of the project if you have achieved these goals. 

For example, if the problem you have identified is that you have a high bounce rate on the main sales page on your website, your objectives of the research may be:

• To identify the key problems on the sales page that is resulting in a high number of users leaving without buying anything
• To understand which audiences are most likely to leave without purchasing anything

Finally, you should identify (if you can) what type of outcomes you want to have from this research project. Will you be writing a report? Will it result in a list of recommended changes to your website? Being very clear about what to expect at the end of the project helps stakeholders get on board and support research projects like these.

3. Define your Key Research Questions

A very important step in any research plan is to identify your key research questions. These are very useful and help you narrow the focus of your research project. They are also really useful when you are analysing your data! When you go to write your report, if you use the data to answer the questions you’ve asked for this project, you’ll know you will have done what you set out to do. 

These questions should be the key questions you are hoping to get an answer to. Try to keep to around five to ten questions. Being as specific as possible to help you focus your research project and get the answers you need to solve your problem. 

Key research questions should be as specific as possible to help you focus your research project and get the answers you need to solve your problem. 

These questions could fall into some of the below categories:

• Why is something happening? 
• Why are your customers behaving a certain way? 
• Why is something not being used?
• What are your audiences’ needs?
• What is motivating your users to do something?
• What specific questions do you have about the product or service?
• What questions do you have after looking into the data that is already available?

The questions you write should not be the questions you ask your audiences. These are often complex and overarching questions, and will most likely need to be broken down when asking your audiences in order to collect useful data. 

4. Write out your Hypotheses and Challenge your Assumptions

An often skipped step, but an important one nonetheless, is to think about any hypotheses you have. Do you expect to have any particular outcomes to the research? Go back to your research questions and write down what you think the answers might be. What do you expect your audiences to do, think or feel? These will entirely be your thoughts and don’t necessarily have to be based in data. To make sure it is clear, you should write these starting each sentence with  “I think….”. 

Now take a look at your research questions again. Have you made any assumptions when crafting your research questions? Did you leave anything out because you assumed you knew the answers? Did you assume something would be more important that something else?

In order to make sure your research is as objective as possible, you need to be aware of what biases you are bringing to the research.

Understanding your hypotheses and assumptions is a crucial step to making your research objective. In order to make sure your research is as objective as possible, you need to be aware of what biases you are bringing to the research. These biases will mean you will be more likely to hear some things over other things. This is called confirmation bias, and it can lead to you making some results more or less important than they actually are. 

It’s useful to document these so you can refer back to them throughout the research process. If you lay out all the things you think might inadvertently impact your interpretation of the results, it will help you from letting confirmation bias influence your research. 

5. Choose your Methodology 

Now that you have a good understanding of what your research project is trying to accomplish, it’s time to choose the right research method to get the information you are looking for!

There are two main types of research methods to choose from: quantitative research and qualitative research. 

Quantitative research identifies what your users are doing while qualitative research helps to understand why users do what they do.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research helps to answer the question: What are your consumers/audiences/users doing? These methods can capture large data sets relatively quickly and give a basic understanding of audience behaviours. Having a large data set allows you to provide a strong confidence in findings relatively quickly. You’ll be able to quickly and easily see if any patterns are emerging. 

While quantitative research is very good at capturing what users are doing, it cannot easily capture what users’ underlying decision making processes are. Further, it does not allow you to follow up on unexpected findings, or have the flexibility to investigate different areas on inquiry. 

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research helps to answer the question: Why are users doing what they’re doing? These research methods can provide an in-depth understanding of user behaviours, attitudes and decision making processes. These methods also allow you to have the flexibility to explore unexpected results, which is often where important or insightful data lies. It usually results in much smaller data sets, but the data is often very rich and cn provide a deep dive into the research questions you are hoping to answer.

Qualitative research does not provide a large data set, and analysis can be time consuming. Further, it is often important to make sure you’re project setup is as objective as possible, as it is possible to accidentally skew your data with your own biases. 

Choosing your Research Method

When deciding on a research method, it can be useful to evaluate whether your key research questions fall into one of the following three categories:

If you are looking to collect breadth in data, you are most likely looking to answer questions around what a large group of people think. Some examples of research methods that can provide breadth in data are surveys, task analysis, or card sorting. These are research methods that work best when a wide range or a large quantity of people need to be reached in order to answer your question. They are useful because the methods themselves allow for data to be categorised relatively easily, which helps analyse quickly. These methods are most useful when testing a hypothesis rather than defining a problem. 

If you are looking to understand the context of something, you are most likely trying to get a better understanding of what problems might exist. Research methods that look for context are most useful when there isn’t much knowledge about the subject. They can often help define the questions as well. Context can be captured with qualitative or quantitative methods. Web or social analytics is a good example of understanding context using a quantitative research method.  Qualitative research methods that capture context include participant observations in natural or group settings. Overall, these methods are good at finding out people’s natural behaviours with little intervention – what they do vs. what they say they do. 

Looking for depth in your key research questions most likely means you’ll be using a qualitative research method, such as interviews or focus groups, to answer your questions. These types of research methods allow you to use open questions to dig deeper into answers and explore topics in greater depth. Depth methods allow you to most accurately define a problem you are hoping to solve with your service or product. Methods such as co-creation or participatory design allow for you to work closely with your audiences to design solutions you know they will like. 

If you’d like to learn more about choosing the right research methods, check out my post: How to Choose the Right Research Method for your Project

6. Recruit your Participants

Once you have chosen the research method that would be best for your project, it’s time to think about who you want to speak to, and how you are going to recruit their help to your project. This is often the most difficult task, but it is one of the most critical things to get correct.

How do you recruit participants for your research project?

The first thing you need to do is identify who you would like to speak to. It could be your entire audience, it could be a subset of people, or it could be people who currently don’t engage with you! 

Finding people from your audience

Once you have an idea of who you want to speak to, think about where you might find them. Maybe you have an email list so it’s as simple as reaching out to your current subscribers! If you don’t currently have anyone on your email list, think about where your audience might be. Would they be in a particular facebook group? Maybe they follow you on social media? Reaching out to your audiences on owned channels such as your social media accounts, via email, or even as a pop up on your website can be a really cheap and easy way to speak to your audiences. 

Finding people who don’t know who you are

And if you’re just starting out, or you want to speak to people who don’t currently follow you, you can always recruit through panels. Depending on how many people you’d like to speak to, you can recruit via panels for relatively low costs, and ensure you’ll get participants that will be relevant to your key research questions. Some survey tools (such as Survey Monkey) have panels you can use built right into their software, or you can search for panels in your country (or the country you’re interested in speaking to participants to) to find a company that would be a good partner for your project. 

How many participants is enough?

How many people is enough for your research project will depend entirely on the research method you choose and the complexity of the questions you are trying to answer. For me, I generally try to get at least 100 survey responses if I’m sending out a survey, and anywhere from six to twenty participants for qualitative research methods such as interviews, focus groups, or co-creation. 

Taking slightly more time to set up a research project has huge benefits and means that your results will be as useful as possible and findings and recommendations will come together much easier and quicker than they would otherwise. 

To find out more about a variety of elements that go into research projects in more detail, check out the other posts on my blog !

What steps do you take when starting research?

Let me know in the comments below if you have tried any of the above methods!

And don’t forget to sign up to my newsletter to recieve more on what research methods to choose, research best practice, and a variety of other relevant and informative content!

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How to Do Research: A Step-By-Step Guide: Get Started

• Get Started
• 1a. Select a Topic
• 1b. Develop Research Questions
• 1c. Identify Keywords
• 1d. Find Background Information
• 1e. Refine a Topic
• 2a. Search Strategies
• 2d. Articles
• 2e. Videos & Images
• 2f. Databases
• 2g. Websites
• 2h. Grey Literature
• 2i. Open Access Materials
• 3a. Evaluate Sources
• 3b. Primary vs. Secondary
• 3c. Types of Periodicals
• 4a. Take Notes
• 4b. Outline the Paper
• 4c. Incorporate Source Material
• 5a. Avoid Plagiarism
• 5b. Zotero & MyBib
• 5c. MLA Formatting
• 5d. MLA Citation Examples
• 5e. APA Formatting
• 5f. APA Citation Examples
• 5g. Annotated Bibliographies

Research Essentials Video Tutorials

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Research Process Overview

Step 1.  Develop a topic Select a Topic | Develop Research Questions | Identify Keywords | Find Background Information | Refine a Topic

Step 2. Locate information Search Strategies | Books | eBooks | Articles  | Videos & Images | Databases | Websites | Grey Literature

Step 3. Evaluate and analyze information Evaluate Sources | Primary vs Secondary | Types of Periodicals

Step 4. Write, organize, and communicate information Take Notes | Outline the Paper | Incorporate Source Material

Step 5. Cite sources Avoid Plagiarism | Zotero & MyBib | MLA | APA | Chicago Style | Annotated Bibliographies

For research help,  use one of the following options:

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Starting steps for research project success

Research projects are an important part of a student’s academic career. They’re an integral part of the learning process, providing students with the opportunity to explore a particular topic in-depth, develop research skills, and make an original contribution to their field of study.

That said, they can also be a source of stress for many students, particularly if it’s their first time writing a research project. The best way to approach a project of this size is to break it down into smaller steps and ensure you’ve laid the groundwork before you even begin writing.

In this article, we’ll look at different elements of beginning a research project, including writing a proposal, starting steps, and how to use monday.com to organize all your research and tasks in one place.

What is a research project?

A research project is an organized effort to investigate a specific question or topic. It can involve either quantitative or qualitative research methods and can include surveys, interviews, or literature reviews.

The goal of a research project is to answer a question or hypothesis by exploring new ideas and testing theories.

In an academic setting, research projects are typically conducted by students, faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, or graduate students, and may involve collaborations with outside organizations.

How to write a research project proposal

Before beginning to write a research project, you need to first write a proposal. A research project proposal is a document used to outline the specific goals, methods, and resources required for a research project. It’s used to present the planned research to potential sponsors or other stakeholders in order to receive approval to proceed with the project.

There are several elements to include in a project proposal that will not only help guide your research but help show why your topic is relevant and worth pursuing.

• Title: Develop a clear and concise title for your research project proposal.
• Introduction: Give background, including the purpose and importance of the research.
• Objectives: List the specific objectives of your research project.
• Methodology: Describe the methods and techniques you will use.
• Resources: Describe the resources you will need to carry out your project.
• Timeline: Provide a timeline for completion and bring up any potential obstacles or risks.
• Expected outcomes: Identify the expected outcomes, including possible implications.
• Budget: Estimate the costs of completing the project and any necessary funding.
• References: Provide references that you’ll cite that help prove your topic is relevant.

Looking at examples of other research project proposals will be helpful to visualize what yours should look like. Here are examples of successful project proposals in the field of social policy and criminology as well as a Ph.D. project in politics .

A project proposal template from monday.com can help you build out your project proposal. This template will ensure that you aren’t missing any essential elements that can result in your research project getting rejected or needing to edit and resubmit a new proposal.

5 starting steps for writing a research project

While there are many different steps to the writing portion of a research project, the initial setup of your project will not only set you up for success but will make the writing go a lot more smoothly. Here are five steps you should take when you’re just starting your research project.

1. Find the right supervisor

A good supervisor will provide guidance on the design, methods, and structure of your research project, as well as advice on how to best analyze and interpret data. A good way to find the right supervisor is to speak with faculty members in a department, a trusted professor, or a colleague to discuss who might be the best fit. When you have a list of potential advisors, send them an email to introduce yourself and your project before asking to meet to discuss the next steps.

2. Choose your topic

After finding a supervisor, they may be able to help you narrow down your topic. The more specific your topic, the better you’ll be able to sharpen the direction of your research so that you can explore your topic in greater depth. It can also save time by allowing you to tighten the scope of your research and focus on the most relevant aspects of the topic.

3. Develop a thesis

A thesis serves as the main point or argument and provides direction and focus to a project, allowing you to collect and organize information more efficiently. A clear and concise thesis statement guides readers in understanding the project’s purpose and ensures that readers will be able to follow the main thread of your argument.

4. Create a timeline

When you begin your research, it’s important to create a timeline to set a framework for the project and ensure that it’s completed on time. It also keeps you organized on various tasks and ensures all steps are accounted for, from researching to writing and editing. Finally, a timeline can help you stay motivated and on track.

5. Write your outline

Outlines provide structure and clarity and allow you to organize your thoughts in a logical order. An outline serves as a roadmap for your research, allowing you to focus on the important points and not get sidetracked. It may also help identify gaps in your research, which can be addressed before beginning the writing process.

monday.com can help you organize your research project

Given all the different steps to take before you even begin writing, staying organized and on top of each task will ensure your project runs seamlessly. Project management tools such as monday.com can help you stay organized so that you don’t overlook an important step in your project. There are a few specific monday.com features that make it an excellent tool for anyone working on a research project.

Track your project with timelines

Create a timeline to see when different elements of your research project are due and see if you’re on time with your project proposal’s timeline.

Organize your tasks in one place

There are tons of small tasks in each research project, from planning a project, collecting and organizing data, communications, surveying, and more. With monday.com’s task management tools, you can make sure you’ve accounted for all tasks you need to complete so that you don’t miss a thing.

Use a template to make a visual plan

The student planner template allows you to visualize your project plan. Not only is this a good place to track tasks, but you can also add in information such as budgets, contact information, priorities, and even attach files for each access to your project’s information all in one place.

How do you start a research project?

When starting a research project, the first step is to create a research question or hypothesis that will be the focus of the project. Next, you’ll want to begin gathering information, finding a supervisor, forming your thesis, and outlining your project.

What are some examples of research projects?

Research projects vary widely depending on the field. For example, in biology, some research projects have focused on investigating the effects of a medication or therapy on a specific group of patients or looking at the role of genetics in disease.

How do I find a research project topic?

There are many different ways to find a topic. For starters, consider which topics interest you. From there, you can research online, speak with professors or advisors, and attend conferences and workshops to find ideas.

Make sure you have all you need to start writing

Writing a research project takes a lot of time, dedication, and focus. They can also be stressful, especially if it’s your first time writing one. Following the steps and guidelines here will make your research project more successful. Additionally, using a project management work tool like monday.com to organize your research project is one of the best ways to alleviate the stress of staying on top of your tasks and timeline so that you can better focus on the research itself.

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The critical steps for successful research: The research proposal and scientific writing: (A report on the pre-conference workshop held in conjunction with the 64 th annual conference of the Indian Pharmaceutical Congress-2012)

Pitchai balakumar.

Pharmacology Unit, Faculty of Pharmacy, AIMST University, Semeling, 08100 Bedong. Kedah Darul Aman, Malaysia

Mohammed Naseeruddin Inamdar

1 Department of Pharmacology, Al-Ameen College of Pharmacy, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Gowraganahalli Jagadeesh

2 Division of Cardiovascular and Renal Products, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, US Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, USA

An interactive workshop on ‘The Critical Steps for Successful Research: The Research Proposal and Scientific Writing’ was conducted in conjunction with the 64 th Annual Conference of the Indian Pharmaceutical Congress-2012 at Chennai, India. In essence, research is performed to enlighten our understanding of a contemporary issue relevant to the needs of society. To accomplish this, a researcher begins search for a novel topic based on purpose, creativity, critical thinking, and logic. This leads to the fundamental pieces of the research endeavor: Question, objective, hypothesis, experimental tools to test the hypothesis, methodology, and data analysis. When correctly performed, research should produce new knowledge. The four cornerstones of good research are the well-formulated protocol or proposal that is well executed, analyzed, discussed and concluded. This recent workshop educated researchers in the critical steps involved in the development of a scientific idea to its successful execution and eventual publication.

INTRODUCTION

Creativity and critical thinking are of particular importance in scientific research. Basically, research is original investigation undertaken to gain knowledge and understand concepts in major subject areas of specialization, and includes the generation of ideas and information leading to new or substantially improved scientific insights with relevance to the needs of society. Hence, the primary objective of research is to produce new knowledge. Research is both theoretical and empirical. It is theoretical because the starting point of scientific research is the conceptualization of a research topic and development of a research question and hypothesis. Research is empirical (practical) because all of the planned studies involve a series of observations, measurements, and analyses of data that are all based on proper experimental design.[ 1 – 9 ]

The subject of this report is to inform readers of the proceedings from a recent workshop organized by the 64 th Annual conference of the ‘ Indian Pharmaceutical Congress ’ at SRM University, Chennai, India, from 05 to 06 December 2012. The objectives of the workshop titled ‘The Critical Steps for Successful Research: The Research Proposal and Scientific Writing,’ were to assist participants in developing a strong fundamental understanding of how best to develop a research or study protocol, and communicate those research findings in a conference setting or scientific journal. Completing any research project requires meticulous planning, experimental design and execution, and compilation and publication of findings in the form of a research paper. All of these are often unfamiliar to naïve researchers; thus, the purpose of this workshop was to teach participants to master the critical steps involved in the development of an idea to its execution and eventual publication of the results (See the last section for a list of learning objectives).

THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORKSHOP

The two-day workshop was formatted to include key lectures and interactive breakout sessions that focused on protocol development in six subject areas of the pharmaceutical sciences. This was followed by sessions on scientific writing. DAY 1 taught the basic concepts of scientific research, including: (1) how to formulate a topic for research and to describe the what, why , and how of the protocol, (2) biomedical literature search and review, (3) study designs, statistical concepts, and result analyses, and (4) publication ethics. DAY 2 educated the attendees on the basic elements and logistics of writing a scientific paper and thesis, and preparation of poster as well as oral presentations.

The final phase of the workshop was the ‘Panel Discussion,’ including ‘Feedback/Comments’ by participants. There were thirteen distinguished speakers from India and abroad. Approximately 120 post-graduate and pre-doctoral students, young faculty members, and scientists representing industries attended the workshop from different parts of the country. All participants received a printed copy of the workshop manual and supporting materials on statistical analyses of data.

THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF RESEARCH: THE KEY TO GETTING STARTED IN RESEARCH

A research project generally comprises four key components: (1) writing a protocol, (2) performing experiments, (3) tabulating and analyzing data, and (4) writing a thesis or manuscript for publication.

Fundamentals in the research process

A protocol, whether experimental or clinical, serves as a navigator that evolves from a basic outline of the study plan to become a qualified research or grant proposal. It provides the structural support for the research. Dr. G. Jagadeesh (US FDA), the first speaker of the session, spoke on ‘ Fundamentals in research process and cornerstones of a research project .’ He discussed at length the developmental and structural processes in preparing a research protocol. A systematic and step-by-step approach is necessary in planning a study. Without a well-designed protocol, there would be a little chance for successful completion of a research project or an experiment.

Research topic

The first and the foremost difficult task in research is to identify a topic for investigation. The research topic is the keystone of the entire scientific enterprise. It begins the project, drives the entire study, and is crucial for moving the project forward. It dictates the remaining elements of the study [ Table 1 ] and thus, it should not be too narrow or too broad or unfocused. Because of these potential pitfalls, it is essential that a good or novel scientific idea be based on a sound concept. Creativity, critical thinking, and logic are required to generate new concepts and ideas in solving a research problem. Creativity involves critical thinking and is associated with generating many ideas. Critical thinking is analytical, judgmental, and involves evaluating choices before making a decision.[ 4 ] Thus, critical thinking is convergent type thinking that narrows and refines those divergent ideas and finally settles to one idea for an in-depth study. The idea on which a research project is built should be novel, appropriate to achieve within the existing conditions, and useful to the society at large. Therefore, creativity and critical thinking assist biomedical scientists in research that results in funding support, novel discovery, and publication.[ 1 , 4 ]

Elements of a study protocol

Research question

The next most crucial aspect of a study protocol is identifying a research question. It should be a thought-provoking question. The question sets the framework. It emerges from the title, findings/results, and problems observed in previous studies. Thus, mastering the literature, attendance at conferences, and discussion in journal clubs/seminars are sources for developing research questions. Consider the following example in developing related research questions from the research topic.

Hepatoprotective activity of Terminalia arjuna and Apium graveolens on paracetamol-induced liver damage in albino rats.

How is paracetamol metabolized in the body? Does it involve P450 enzymes? How does paracetamol cause liver injury? What are the mechanisms by which drugs can alleviate liver damage? What biochemical parameters are indicative of liver injury? What major endogenous inflammatory molecules are involved in paracetamol-induced liver damage?

A research question is broken down into more precise objectives. The objectives lead to more precise methods and definition of key terms. The objectives should be SMART-Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-framed,[ 10 ] and should cover the entire breadth of the project. The objectives are sometimes organized into hierarchies: Primary, secondary, and exploratory; or simply general and specific. Study the following example:

To evaluate the safety and tolerability of single oral doses of compound X in normal volunteers.

To assess the pharmacokinetic profile of compound X following single oral doses.

To evaluate the incidence of peripheral edema reported as an adverse event.

The objectives and research questions are then formulated into a workable or testable hypothesis. The latter forces us to think carefully about what comparisons will be needed to answer the research question, and establishes the format for applying statistical tests to interpret the results. The hypothesis should link a process to an existing or postulated biologic pathway. A hypothesis is written in a form that can yield measurable results. Studies that utilize statistics to compare groups of data should have a hypothesis. Consider the following example:

• The hepatoprotective activity of Terminalia arjuna is superior to that of Apium graveolens against paracetamol-induced liver damage in albino rats.

All biological research, including discovery science, is hypothesis-driven. However, not all studies need be conducted with a hypothesis. For example, descriptive studies (e.g., describing characteristics of a plant, or a chemical compound) do not need a hypothesis.[ 1 ]

Relevance of the study

Another important section to be included in the protocol is ‘significance of the study.’ Its purpose is to justify the need for the research that is being proposed (e.g., development of a vaccine for a disease). In summary, the proposed study should demonstrate that it represents an advancement in understanding and that the eventual results will be meaningful, contribute to the field, and possibly even impact society.

Biomedical literature

A literature search may be defined as the process of examining published sources of information on a research or review topic, thesis, grant application, chemical, drug, disease, or clinical trial, etc. The quantity of information available in print or electronically (e.g., the internet) is immense and growing with time. A researcher should be familiar with the right kinds of databases and search engines to extract the needed information.[ 3 , 6 ]

Dr. P. Balakumar (Institute of Pharmacy, Rajendra Institute of Technology and Sciences, Sirsa, Haryana; currently, Faculty of Pharmacy, AIMST University, Malaysia) spoke on ‘ Biomedical literature: Searching, reviewing and referencing .’ He schematically explained the basis of scientific literature, designing a literature review, and searching literature. After an introduction to the genesis and diverse sources of scientific literature searches, the use of PubMed, one of the premier databases used for biomedical literature searches world-wide, was illustrated with examples and screenshots. Several companion databases and search engines are also used for finding information related to health sciences, and they include Embase, Web of Science, SciFinder, The Cochrane Library, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Scopus, and Google Scholar.[ 3 ] Literature searches using alternative interfaces for PubMed such as GoPubMed, Quertle, PubFocus, Pubget, and BibliMed were discussed. The participants were additionally informed of databases on chemistry, drugs and drug targets, clinical trials, toxicology, and laboratory animals (reviewed in ref[ 3 ]).

Referencing and bibliography are essential in scientific writing and publication.[ 7 ] Referencing systems are broadly classified into two major types, such as Parenthetical and Notation systems. Parenthetical referencing is also known as Harvard style of referencing, while Vancouver referencing style and ‘Footnote’ or ‘Endnote’ are placed under Notation referencing systems. The participants were educated on each referencing system with examples.

Bibliography management

Dr. Raj Rajasekaran (University of California at San Diego, CA, USA) enlightened the audience on ‘ bibliography management ’ using reference management software programs such as Reference Manager ® , Endnote ® , and Zotero ® for creating and formatting bibliographies while writing a manuscript for publication. The discussion focused on the use of bibliography management software in avoiding common mistakes such as incomplete references. Important steps in bibliography management, such as creating reference libraries/databases, searching for references using PubMed/Google scholar, selecting and transferring selected references into a library, inserting citations into a research article and formatting bibliographies, were presented. A demonstration of Zotero®, a freely available reference management program, included the salient features of the software, adding references from PubMed using PubMed ID, inserting citations and formatting using different styles.

Writing experimental protocols

The workshop systematically instructed the participants in writing ‘ experimental protocols ’ in six disciplines of Pharmaceutical Sciences.: (1) Pharmaceutical Chemistry (presented by Dr. P. V. Bharatam, NIPER, Mohali, Punjab); (2) Pharmacology (presented by Dr. G. Jagadeesh and Dr. P. Balakumar); (3) Pharmaceutics (presented by Dr. Jayant Khandare, Piramal Life Sciences, Mumbai); (4) Pharmacy Practice (presented by Dr. Shobha Hiremath, Al-Ameen College of Pharmacy, Bengaluru); (5) Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry (presented by Dr. Salma Khanam, Al-Ameen College of Pharmacy, Bengaluru); and (6) Pharmaceutical Analysis (presented by Dr. Saranjit Singh, NIPER, Mohali, Punjab). The purpose of the research plan is to describe the what (Specific Aims/Objectives), why (Background and Significance), and how (Design and Methods) of the proposal.

The research plan should answer the following questions: (a) what do you intend to do; (b) what has already been done in general, and what have other researchers done in the field; (c) why is this worth doing; (d) how is it innovative; (e) what will this new work add to existing knowledge; and (f) how will the research be accomplished?

In general, the format used by the faculty in all subjects is shown in Table 2 .

Elements of a research protocol

Biostatistics

Biostatistics is a key component of biomedical research. Highly reputed journals like The Lancet, BMJ, Journal of the American Medical Association, and many other biomedical journals include biostatisticians on their editorial board or reviewers list. This indicates that a great importance is given for learning and correctly employing appropriate statistical methods in biomedical research. The post-lunch session on day 1 of the workshop was largely committed to discussion on ‘ Basic biostatistics .’ Dr. R. Raveendran (JIPMER, Puducherry) and Dr. Avijit Hazra (PGIMER, Kolkata) reviewed, in parallel sessions, descriptive statistics, probability concepts, sample size calculation, choosing a statistical test, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and ‘ P ’ values, parametric and non-parametric statistical tests, including analysis of variance (ANOVA), t tests, Chi-square test, type I and type II errors, correlation and regression, and summary statistics. This was followed by a practice and demonstration session. Statistics CD, compiled by Dr. Raveendran, was distributed to the participants before the session began and was demonstrated live. Both speakers worked on a variety of problems that involved both clinical and experimental data. They discussed through examples the experimental designs encountered in a variety of studies and statistical analyses performed for different types of data. For the benefit of readers, we have summarized statistical tests applied frequently for different experimental designs and post-hoc tests [ Figure 1 ].

Conceptual framework for statistical analyses of data. Of the two kinds of variables, qualitative (categorical) and quantitative (numerical), qualitative variables (nominal or ordinal) are not normally distributed. Numerical data that come from normal distributions are analyzed using parametric tests, if not; the data are analyzed using non-parametric tests. The most popularly used Student's t -test compares the means of two populations, data for this test could be paired or unpaired. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to compare the means of three or more independent populations that are normally distributed. Applying t test repeatedly in pair (multiple comparison), to compare the means of more than two populations, will increase the probability of type I error (false positive). In this case, for proper interpretation, we need to adjust the P values. Repeated measures ANOVA is used to compare the population means if more than two observations coming from same subject over time. The null hypothesis is rejected with a ‘ P ’ value of less than 0.05, and the difference in population means is considered to be statistically significant. Subsequently, appropriate post-hoc tests are used for pairwise comparisons of population means. Two-way or three-way ANOVA are considered if two (diet, dose) or three (diet, dose, strain) independent factors, respectively, are analyzed in an experiment (not described in the Figure). Categorical nominal unmatched variables (counts or frequencies) are analyzed by Chi-square test (not shown in the Figure)

Research and publication ethics

The legitimate pursuit of scientific creativity is unfortunately being marred by a simultaneous increase in scientific misconduct. A disproportionate share of allegations involves scientists of many countries, and even from respected laboratories. Misconduct destroys faith in science and scientists and creates a hierarchy of fraudsters. Investigating misconduct also steals valuable time and resources. In spite of these facts, most researchers are not aware of publication ethics.

Day 1 of the workshop ended with a presentation on ‘ research and publication ethics ’ by Dr. M. K. Unnikrishnan (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Manipal University, Manipal). He spoke on the essentials of publication ethics that included plagiarism (attempting to take credit of the work of others), self-plagiarism (multiple publications by an author on the same content of work with slightly different wordings), falsification (manipulation of research data and processes and omitting critical data or results), gift authorship (guest authorship), ghostwriting (someone other than the named author (s) makes a major contribution), salami publishing (publishing many papers, with minor differences, from the same study), and sabotage (distracting the research works of others to halt their research completion). Additionally, Dr. Unnikrishnan pointed out the ‘ Ingelfinger rule ’ of stipulating that a scientist must not submit the same original research in two different journals. He also advised the audience that authorship is not just credit for the work but also responsibility for scientific contents of a paper. Although some Indian Universities are instituting preventive measures (e.g., use of plagiarism detecting software, Shodhganga digital archiving of doctoral theses), Dr. Unnikrishnan argued for a great need to sensitize young researchers on the nature and implications of scientific misconduct. Finally, he discussed methods on how editors and peer reviewers should ethically conduct themselves while managing a manuscript for publication.

SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION: THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL SELLING OF FINDINGS

Research outcomes are measured through quality publications. Scientists must not only ‘do’ science but must ‘write’ science. The story of the project must be told in a clear, simple language weaving in previous work done in the field, answering the research question, and addressing the hypothesis set forth at the beginning of the study. Scientific publication is an organic process of planning, researching, drafting, revising, and updating the current knowledge for future perspectives. Writing a research paper is no easier than the research itself. The lectures of Day 2 of the workshop dealt with the basic elements and logistics of writing a scientific paper.

An overview of paper structure and thesis writing

Dr. Amitabh Prakash (Adis, Auckland, New Zealand) spoke on ‘ Learning how to write a good scientific paper .’ His presentation described the essential components of an original research paper and thesis (e.g., introduction, methods, results, and discussion [IMRaD]) and provided guidance on the correct order, in which data should appear within these sections. The characteristics of a good abstract and title and the creation of appropriate key words were discussed. Dr. Prakash suggested that the ‘title of a paper’ might perhaps have a chance to make a good impression, and the title might be either indicative (title that gives the purpose of the study) or declarative (title that gives the study conclusion). He also suggested that an abstract is a succinct summary of a research paper, and it should be specific, clear, and concise, and should have IMRaD structure in brief, followed by key words. Selection of appropriate papers to be cited in the reference list was also discussed. Various unethical authorships were enumerated, and ‘The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for authorship’ was explained ( http://www.icmje.org/ethical_1author.html ; also see Table 1 in reference #9). The session highlighted the need for transparency in medical publication and provided a clear description of items that needed to be included in the ‘Disclosures’ section (e.g., sources of funding for the study and potential conflicts of interest of all authors, etc.) and ‘Acknowledgements’ section (e.g., writing assistance and input from all individuals who did not meet the authorship criteria). The final part of the presentation was devoted to thesis writing, and Dr. Prakash provided the audience with a list of common mistakes that are frequently encountered when writing a manuscript.

The backbone of a study is description of results through Text, Tables, and Figures. Dr. S. B. Deshpande (Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India) spoke on ‘ Effective Presentation of Results .’ The Results section deals with the observations made by the authors and thus, is not hypothetical. This section is subdivided into three segments, that is, descriptive form of the Text, providing numerical data in Tables, and visualizing the observations in Graphs or Figures. All these are arranged in a sequential order to address the question hypothesized in the Introduction. The description in Text provides clear content of the findings highlighting the observations. It should not be the repetition of facts in tables or graphs. Tables are used to summarize or emphasize descriptive content in the text or to present the numerical data that are unrelated. Illustrations should be used when the evidence bearing on the conclusions of a paper cannot be adequately presented in a written description or in a Table. Tables or Figures should relate to each other logically in sequence and should be clear by themselves. Furthermore, the discussion is based entirely on these observations. Additionally, how the results are applied to further research in the field to advance our understanding of research questions was discussed.

Dr. Peush Sahni (All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi) spoke on effectively ‘ structuring the Discussion ’ for a research paper. The Discussion section deals with a systematic interpretation of study results within the available knowledge. He said the section should begin with the most important point relating to the subject studied, focusing on key issues, providing link sentences between paragraphs, and ensuring the flow of text. Points were made to avoid history, not repeat all the results, and provide limitations of the study. The strengths and novel findings of the study should be provided in the discussion, and it should open avenues for future research and new questions. The Discussion section should end with a conclusion stating the summary of key findings. Dr. Sahni gave an example from a published paper for writing a Discussion. In another presentation titled ‘ Writing an effective title and the abstract ,’ Dr. Sahni described the important components of a good title, such as, it should be simple, concise, informative, interesting and eye-catching, accurate and specific about the paper's content, and should state the subject in full indicating study design and animal species. Dr. Sahni explained structured (IMRaD) and unstructured abstracts and discussed a few selected examples with the audience.

Language and style in publication

The next lecture of Dr. Amitabh Prakash on ‘ Language and style in scientific writing: Importance of terseness, shortness and clarity in writing ’ focused on the actual sentence construction, language, grammar and punctuation in scientific manuscripts. His presentation emphasized the importance of brevity and clarity in the writing of manuscripts describing biomedical research. Starting with a guide to the appropriate construction of sentences and paragraphs, attendees were given a brief overview of the correct use of punctuation with interactive examples. Dr. Prakash discussed common errors in grammar and proactively sought audience participation in correcting some examples. Additional discussion was centered on discouraging the use of redundant and expendable words, jargon, and the use of adjectives with incomparable words. The session ended with a discussion of words and phrases that are commonly misused (e.g., data vs . datum, affect vs . effect, among vs . between, dose vs . dosage, and efficacy/efficacious vs . effective/effectiveness) in biomedical research manuscripts.

Working with journals

The appropriateness in selecting the journal for submission and acceptance of the manuscript should be determined by the experience of an author. The corresponding author must have a rationale in choosing the appropriate journal, and this depends upon the scope of the study and the quality of work performed. Dr. Amitabh Prakash spoke on ‘ Working with journals: Selecting a journal, cover letter, peer review process and impact factor ’ by instructing the audience in assessing the true value of a journal, understanding principles involved in the peer review processes, providing tips on making an initial approach to the editorial office, and drafting an appropriate cover letter to accompany the submission. His presentation defined the metrics that are most commonly used to measure journal quality (e.g., impact factor™, Eigenfactor™ score, Article Influence™ score, SCOPUS 2-year citation data, SCImago Journal Rank, h-Index, etc.) and guided attendees on the relative advantages and disadvantages of using each metric. Factors to consider when assessing journal quality were discussed, and the audience was educated on the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ open access publication models. Various peer review models (e.g., double-blind, single-blind, non-blind) were described together with the role of the journal editor in assessing manuscripts and selecting suitable reviewers. A typical checklist sent to referees was shared with the attendees, and clear guidance was provided on the best way to address referee feedback. The session concluded with a discussion of the potential drawbacks of the current peer review system.

Poster and oral presentations at conferences

Posters have become an increasingly popular mode of presentation at conferences, as it can accommodate more papers per meeting, has no time constraint, provides a better presenter-audience interaction, and allows one to select and attend papers of interest. In Figure 2 , we provide instructions, design, and layout in preparing a scientific poster. In the final presentation, Dr. Sahni provided the audience with step-by-step instructions on how to write and format posters for layout, content, font size, color, and graphics. Attendees were given specific guidance on the format of text on slides, the use of color, font type and size, and the use of illustrations and multimedia effects. Moreover, the importance of practical tips while delivering oral or poster presentation was provided to the audience, such as speak slowly and clearly, be informative, maintain eye contact, and listen to the questions from judges/audience carefully before coming up with an answer.

Guidelines and design to scientific poster presentation. The objective of scientific posters is to present laboratory work in scientific meetings. A poster is an excellent means of communicating scientific work, because it is a graphic representation of data. Posters should have focus points, and the intended message should be clearly conveyed through simple sections: Text, Tables, and Graphs. Posters should be clear, succinct, striking, and eye-catching. Colors should be used only where necessary. Use one font (Arial or Times New Roman) throughout. Fancy fonts should be avoided. All headings should have font size of 44, and be in bold capital letters. Size of Title may be a bit larger; subheading: Font size of 36, bold and caps. References and Acknowledgments, if any, should have font size of 24. Text should have font size between 24 and 30, in order to be legible from a distance of 3 to 6 feet. Do not use lengthy notes

PANEL DISCUSSION: FEEDBACK AND COMMENTS BY PARTICIPANTS

After all the presentations were made, Dr. Jagadeesh began a panel discussion that included all speakers. The discussion was aimed at what we do currently and could do in the future with respect to ‘developing a research question and then writing an effective thesis proposal/protocol followed by publication.’ Dr. Jagadeesh asked the following questions to the panelists, while receiving questions/suggestions from the participants and panelists.

• Does a Post-Graduate or Ph.D. student receive adequate training, either through an institutional course, a workshop of the present nature, or from the guide?
• Are these Post-Graduates self-taught (like most of us who learnt the hard way)?
• How are these guides trained? How do we train them to become more efficient mentors?
• Does a Post-Graduate or Ph.D. student struggle to find a method (s) to carry out studies? To what extent do seniors/guides help a post graduate overcome technical difficulties? How difficult is it for a student to find chemicals, reagents, instruments, and technical help in conducting studies?
• Analyses of data and interpretation: Most students struggle without adequate guidance.
• Thesis and publications frequently feature inadequate/incorrect statistical analyses and representation of data in tables/graphs. The student, their guide, and the reviewers all share equal responsibility.
• Who initiates and drafts the research paper? The Post-Graduate or their guide?
• What kind of assistance does a Post-Graduate get from the guide in finalizing a paper for publication?
• Does the guide insist that each Post-Graduate thesis yield at least one paper, and each Ph.D. thesis more than two papers, plus a review article?

The panelists and audience expressed a variety of views, but were unable to arrive at a decisive conclusion.

WHAT HAVE THE PARTICIPANTS LEARNED?

At the end of this fast-moving two-day workshop, the participants had opportunities in learning the following topics:

• Sequential steps in developing a study protocol, from choosing a research topic to developing research questions and a hypothesis.
• Study protocols on different topics in their subject of specialization
• Searching and reviewing the literature
• Appropriate statistical analyses in biomedical research
• Scientific ethics in publication
• Writing and understanding the components of a research paper (IMRaD)
• Recognizing the value of good title, running title, abstract, key words, etc
• Importance of Tables and Figures in the Results section, and their importance in describing findings
• Evidence-based Discussion in a research paper
• Language and style in writing a paper and expert tips on getting it published
• Presentation of research findings at a conference (oral and poster).

Overall, the workshop was deemed very helpful to participants. The participants rated the quality of workshop from “ satisfied ” to “ very satisfied .” A significant number of participants were of the opinion that the time allotted for each presentation was short and thus, be extended from the present two days to four days with adequate time to ask questions. In addition, a ‘hands-on’ session should be introduced for writing a proposal and manuscript. A large number of attendees expressed their desire to attend a similar workshop, if conducted, in the near future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We gratefully express our gratitude to the Organizing Committee, especially Professors K. Chinnasamy, B. G. Shivananda, N. Udupa, Jerad Suresh, Padma Parekh, A. P. Basavarajappa, Mr. S. V. Veerramani, Mr. J. Jayaseelan, and all volunteers of the SRM University. We thank Dr. Thomas Papoian (US FDA) for helpful comments on the manuscript.

The opinions expressed herein are those of Gowraganahalli Jagadeesh and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Food and Drug Administration

Source of Support: Nil

Conflict of Interest: None declared.

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• 10 Research Question Examples to Guide Your Research Project

10 Research Question Examples to Guide your Research Project

Published on October 30, 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on October 19, 2023.

The research question is one of the most important parts of your research paper , thesis or dissertation . It’s important to spend some time assessing and refining your question before you get started.

The exact form of your question will depend on a few things, such as the length of your project, the type of research you’re conducting, the topic , and the research problem . However, all research questions should be focused, specific, and relevant to a timely social or scholarly issue.

Once you’ve read our guide on how to write a research question , you can use these examples to craft your own.

Note that the design of your research question can depend on what method you are pursuing. Here are a few options for qualitative, quantitative, and statistical research questions.

Other interesting articles

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Methodology

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

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McCombes, S. (2023, October 19). 10 Research Question Examples to Guide your Research Project. Scribbr. Retrieved June 24, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-process/research-question-examples/

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How to Prepare for a Research Project

Whether you’re starting your first research project or your fifth, each project is unique and can be a lot to manage. From research proposals, project planning, data collection and report writing, there’s a lot to consider. In this article, we have five tips to help you prepare effectively for your upcoming research projects. 

‍ Outline Current Ideas ‍

Getting started is often the hardest part of any project. This is why writing out the ideas currently on your mind is a good first step for building momentum and giving direction. You can map out your current ideas, see where they link and note any aims you have for the project. This might be topic specific, such as what you would like to learn about the subject area or these could be personal. For example, what skills do you hope to gain? You might be interested in learning how to write a literature review, or present findings in a concise way. This can highlight areas to focus on when planning your project. 

Commit to a Research Space

Research projects are ongoing over a long period of time and require multiple resources that need to be tracked. In preparation, it’s a good idea to decide on a system for storing all this information and keeping track of ideas that might be relevant months after you thought of them. You could use a research notebook where you write reading notes, meeting notes, questions and so on. Alternatively, you can take your reading notes to the next level using tools such as genei, which allows you to create linked notes between various documents. Or note-taking apps such as Craft and Notion that also allow for back-linking and connecting ideas. 

Project Planning and Deadlines 

Now, tackling a research project across several months or even years can be overwhelming. You can overcome this by project planning, breaking down the project into sub-tasks and setting deadlines. You can use your research guide and any external deadlines, set by your employer or university, as a starting point. If these provide minimal structure, you can start using internal deadlines based on your commits and goals. e.g., commit to finishing your literature review by October or write 5000 words by May. Keep them short and focused so you’re able to build a tangible to-do list. You can use project planning tools such as gantt charts, which can be implemented in Excel or Notion , and set frequent reminders for internal or external deadlines. 

Examine Your Skillset

Prior to starting a research project, it’s worth looking at the skills and tools you have to complete the project to a good standard. For example, how much do you know about the research methodology or statistical analysis you intend to use? You’ll also need to consider these things when submitting proposals so it’s good to brush up early. Do you feel confident conducting literature reviews? Writing up results? Even if you’re not ready to learn these things, you can Google and store guides in your chosen research space. Likewise, do you have access to the tools you will need and the knowledge to use them effectively? You might need to refamiliarise yourself with particular software or processes. 

Remain Flexible

Finally, keep an open mind and be ready for change. Research projects are complex and things you never anticipated may come to light - that’s okay! This initial preparation means you’re ready for things that might change. Allow for flexibility in your project planning and research workflow. Don’t be afraid to adjust things as you go along.

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Educational resources and simple solutions for your research journey

How to Plan a Research Project

One of the most significant skills of an academician is the knowing how to plan a research project and execute it successfully. This process is often quite stressful, since the skills required for planning and management are not taught in most research groups or academic institutions, and need to be consciously acquired as one proceeds in their career. Over time the challenges that an academician faces while planning a research project keep increasing as the nature of tasks that need to be managed keep multiplying. Planning a research project effectively is the most crucial step as it has direct implications on the overall quality of the project, but it is not easy. If you are looking for some tips on how to plan a research project successfully, then this article will help you out.

1. Define a clear problem statement: As a researcher, you are probably quite familiar with the process of identifying gaps in the existing knowledge base when planning a research project. What you also need to acknowledge right at the beginning is that finding the answers to fill in all those gaps may not necessarily be within the scope of your current project. When you start to plan a research project with this clear understanding, you have the opportunity to ask only relevant questions and define a clear, concise and simple problem statement. Along with this, it is also important to know that the problem statement might keep changing over the course of your project and you need to be flexible enough to modify it as required. If you want know how to plan a research project that has attainable goals, then having a clear and well-defined problem statement is the first step toward it.

2. Set pragmatic goals: Nobody knows more than you how tumultuous and unpredictable a researcher’s journey can be. Additionally, it is always challenging to plan a research project and then ensure it stays on track when multiple variables are involved, which often pose as roadblocks to your project. You can work your way through this by being cautious and pragmatic while setting goals. When planning a research project, consider all the external variables that are beyond your control, and keep troubleshooting strategies ready before beginning your project. This will ensure that your objectives are achieved with minimum hassle. So the next time you find yourself wondering how to plan a research project efficiently, focus on goal setting.

3. Define your timelines: If you often find yourself stuck with how to plan research projects, you’re probably not managing your time well .  So once you have decided the overall objectives and plan for a research project, define the timelines next.  You will need to consider the limited availability of time and resources when planning a research project, as well as the possibility that you may need to revisit and refine your problem statement and objectives routinely throughout the course of this project. Thus, when planning a research project, know that you may not always be realistically possible to adhere to your originally defined timeline. In order to avoid unnecessary delays in your project and to execute the research project successfully, you can break down your objectives into mini-goals that are attainable in a shorter duration. Having weekly or bi-weekly timelines instead of monthly timelines will make it easier to introduce modifications and keep your project on track.

R Discovery is a literature search and research reading platform that accelerates your research discovery journey by keeping you updated on the latest, most relevant scholarly content. With 250M+ research articles sourced from trusted aggregators like CrossRef, Unpaywall, PubMed, PubMed Central, Open Alex and top publishing houses like Springer Nature, JAMA, IOP, Taylor & Francis, NEJM, BMJ, Karger, SAGE, Emerald Publishing and more, R Discovery puts a world of research at your fingertips.  

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Eugene McDermott Library

Introduction to legal research.

• Introduction

How to Start

• Regulations
• Constitutions
• Legal Dictionaries
• Legal Encyclopedias
• Antitrust Laws

Before you Begin

Good research, especially legal research, begins with knowing what it is you are researching. Never feel embarrassed to ask questions during any point of the legal research process. Relying on assumptions, rather than asking questions, may lead to errors in your research.

Understand the scope of the research project . Ensure you have a full understanding of the legal issue under research by taking thorough notes on the assignment. Carefully read, and reread, any materials related to the research project your professor provided.

Initial communications . Confirm your research project meets the expectations of the assignment by emailing or speaking to your professor. In addition, ask your professor if there are ways to improve your research project. Finally, do not forget to confirm the due date of the project.

Create and adhere to a timeline . You will want to create and adhere to a timeline to ensure adequate time is available for you to research a legal issue and to write your analysis. Performing at lease a little research each day is an easy way to adhere to a timeline. 

Continuing communications . Make certain to respond promptly to any communications from your professor. And if you have questions during your research, reach out to your professor to ask for assistance.

Suggested Research Strategy

Ask relevant questions .  Any research into legal matters should begin with a review of the facts of the case.  To make certain you have a thorough understanding of the details at hand, ask yourself the 5Ws: who, what, where, when, why.

Determine the jurisdiction . After you have established the necessary details of the legal issue, you will need to determine what jurisdiction is involved. Is the matter under research governed by federal or state law? For legal questions arising from the states, which state or states issued the law? For federal legal questions, you will need to determine the relevant Circuit and District courts .

Consult secondary sources .  Secondary sources are sources which analyze, critique, or discuss legal issues. In other words, these are resources about the law, not the law itself. Common forms of secondary sources include articles published within legal periodicals, legal dictionaries, and legal treatises.

Consult primary law . Primary law is the actual text of the law as issued by official government bodies. These laws include  statutes , cases , and  regulations . Constitutions , such as the U.S. Constitution , are also considered primary law.

Confirm your authority is still good law . Use a citator, such as Shepard's , in Nexis Uni , to confirm your case remains good law.

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If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?

Have you ever asked why it’s so difficult to get things done in business today—despite seemingly endless meetings and emails? Why it takes so long to make decisions—and even then not necessarily the right ones? You’re not the first to think there must be a better way. Many organizations address these problems by redesigning boxes and lines: who does what and who reports to whom. This exercise tends to focus almost obsessively on vertical command relationships and rarely solves for what, in our experience, is the underlying disease: the poor design and execution of collaborative interactions.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Aaron De Smet , Caitlin Hewes, Mengwei Luo, J.R. Maxwell , and Patrick Simon , representing views from McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice.

In our efforts to connect across our organizations, we’re drowning in real-time virtual interaction technology, from Zoom to Slack to Teams, plus group texting, WeChat, WhatsApp, and everything in between. There’s seemingly no excuse to not collaborate. The problem? Interacting is easier than ever, but true, productive, value-creating collaboration is not. And what’s more, where engagement is occurring, its quality is deteriorating. This wastes valuable resources, because every minute spent on a low-value interaction eats into time that could be used for important, creative, and powerful activities.

It’s no wonder a recent McKinsey survey  found 80 percent of executives were considering or already implementing changes in meeting structure and cadence in response to the evolution in how people work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, most executives say they frequently find themselves spending way too much time on pointless interactions that drain their energy and produce information overload.

Most executives say they frequently find themselves spending way too much time on pointless interactions.

Three critical collaborative interactions

What can be done? We’ve found it’s possible to quickly improve collaborative interactions by categorizing them by type and making a few shifts accordingly. We’ve observed three broad categories of collaborative interactions (exhibit):

• Decision making, including complex or uncertain decisions (for example, investment decisions) and cross-cutting routine decisions (such as quarterly business reviews)
• Creative solutions and coordination, including innovation sessions (for example, developing new products) and routine working sessions (such as daily check-ins)
• Information sharing, including one-way communication (video, for instance) and two-way communication (such as town halls with Q&As)

Below we describe the key shifts required to improve each category of collaborative interaction, as well as tools you can use to pinpoint problems in the moment and take corrective action.

Decision making: Determining decision rights

When you’re told you’re “responsible” for a decision, does that mean you get to decide? What if you’re told you’re “accountable”? Do you cast the deciding vote, or does the person responsible? What about those who must be “consulted”? Sometimes they are told their input will be reflected in the final answer—can they veto a decision if they feel their input was not fully considered?

It’s no wonder one of the key factors for fast, high-quality decisions is to clarify exactly who makes them. Consider a success story at a renewable-energy company. To foster accountability and transparency, the company developed a 30-minute “role card” conversation for managers to have with their direct reports. As part of this conversation, managers explicitly laid out the decision rights and accountability metrics for each direct report. The result? Role clarity enabled easier navigation for employees, sped up decision making, and resulted in decisions that were much more customer focused.

How to define decision rights

We recommend a simple yet comprehensive approach for defining decision rights. We call it DARE, which stands for deciders, advisers, recommenders, and executors:

Deciders are the only ones with a vote (unlike the RACI model, which helps determine who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed). If the deciders get stuck, they should jointly agree on how to escalate the decision or figure out a way to move the process along, even if it means agreeing to “disagree and commit.”

Advisers have input and help shape the decision. They have an outsize voice in setting the context of the decision and have a big stake in its outcome—for example, it may affect their profit-and-loss statements—but they don’t get a vote.

Recommenders conduct the analyses, explore the alternatives, illuminate the pros and cons, and ultimately recommend a course of action to advisers and deciders. They see the day-to-day implications of the decision but also have no vote. Best-in-class recommenders offer multiple options and sometimes invite others to suggest more if doing so may lead to better outcomes. A common mistake of recommenders, though, is coming in with only one recommendation (often the status quo) and trying to convince everyone it’s the best path forward. In general, the more recommenders, the better the process—but not in the decision meeting itself.

Executers don’t give input but are deeply involved in implementing the decision. For speed, clarity, and alignment, executers need to be in the room when the decision is made so they can ask clarifying questions and spot flaws that might hinder implementation. Notably, the number of executers doesn’t necessarily depend on the importance of the decision. An M&A decision, for example, might have just two executors: the CFO and a business-unit head.

To make this shift, ensure everyone is crystal clear about who has a voice but no vote or veto. Our research indicates while it is often helpful to involve more people in decision making, not all of them should be deciders—in many cases, just one individual should be the decider (see sidebar “How to define decision rights”). Don’t underestimate the difficulty of implementing this. It often goes against our risk-averse instinct to ensure everyone is “happy” with a decision, particularly our superiors and major stakeholders. Executing and sustaining this change takes real courage and leadership.

Creative solutions and coordination: Open innovation

Routine working sessions are fairly straightforward. What many organizations struggle with is finding innovative ways to identify and drive toward solutions. How often do you tell your teams what to do versus empowering them to come up with solutions? While they may solve the immediate need to “get stuff done,” bureaucracies and micromanagement are a recipe for disaster. They slow down the organizational response to the market and customers, prevent leaders from focusing on strategic priorities, and harm employee engagement. Our research suggests  key success factors in winning organizations are empowering employees  and spending more time on high-quality coaching interactions.

How microenterprises empower employees to drive innovative solutions

Haier, a Chinese appliance maker, created more than 4,000 microenterprises (MEs) that share common approaches but operate independently. Haier has three types of microenterprises:

• Market-facing MEs have roots in Haier’s legacy appliance business, reinvented for today’s customer-centric, web-enabled world. They are expected to grow revenue and profit ten times faster than the industry average.
• Incubating MEs focus on emerging markets such as e-gaming or wrapping new business models around familiar products. They currently account for more than 10 percent of Haier’s market capitalization.
• “Node” MEs sell market-facing ME products and services such as design, manufacturing, and human-resources support.

Take Haier. The Chinese appliance maker divided itself into more than 4,000 microenterprises with ten to 15 employees each, organized in an open ecosystem of users, inventors, and partners (see sidebar “How microenterprises empower employees to drive innovative solutions”). This shift turned employees into energetic entrepreneurs who were directly accountable for customers. Haier’s microenterprises are free to form and evolve with little central direction, but they share the same approach to target setting, internal contracting, and cross-unit coordination. Empowering employees to drive innovative solutions has taken the company from innovation-phobic to entrepreneurial at scale. Since 2015, revenue from Haier Smart Home, the company’s listed home-appliance business, has grown by more than 18 percent a year, topping 209 billion renminbi ($32 billion) in 2020. The company has also made a string of acquisitions, including the 2016 purchase of GE Appliances, with new ventures creating more than $2 billion in market value.

Empowering others doesn’t mean leaving them alone. Successful empowerment, counterintuitively, doesn’t mean leaving employees alone. Empowerment requires leaders to give employees both the tools and the right level of guidance and involvement. Leaders should play what we call the coach role: coaches don’t tell people what to do but instead provide guidance and guardrails and ensure accountability, while stepping back and allowing others to come up with solutions.

Haier was able to use a variety of tools—including objectives and key results (OKRs) and common problem statements—to foster an agile way of working across the enterprise that focuses innovative organizational energy on the most important topics. Not all companies can do this, and some will never be ready for enterprise agility. But every organization can take steps to improve the speed and quality of decisions made by empowered individuals.

Managers who are great coaches, for example, have typically benefited from years of investment by mentors, sponsors, and organizations. We think all organizations should do more to improve the coaching skills of managers and help them to create the space and time to coach teams, as opposed to filling out reports, presenting in meetings, and other activities that take time away from driving impact through the work of their teams.

But while great coaches take time to develop, something as simple as a daily stand-up or check-in can drive horizontal connectivity, creating the space for teams to understand what others are doing and where they need help to drive work forward without having to specifically task anyone in a hierarchical way. You may also consider how you are driving a focus on outcomes over activities on a near-term and long-term basis. Whether it’s OKRs or something else, how is your organization proactively communicating a focus on impact and results over tasks and activities? What do you measure? How is it tracked? How is the performance of your people and your teams managed against it? Over what time horizons?

The importance of psychological safety. As you start this journey, be sure to take a close look at psychological safety. If employees don’t feel psychologically safe, it will be nearly impossible for leaders and managers to break through disempowering behaviors like constant escalation, hiding problems or risks, and being afraid to ask questions—no matter how skilled they are as coaches.

Employers should be on the lookout for common problems indicating that significant challenges to psychological safety lurk underneath the surface. Consider asking yourself and your teams questions to test the degree of psychological safety you have cultivated: Do employees have space to bring up concerns or dissent? Do they feel that if they make a mistake it will be held against them? Do they feel they can take risks or ask for help? Do they feel others may undermine them? Do employees feel valued for their unique skills and talents? If the answer to any of these is not a clear-cut “yes,” the organization likely has room for improvement on psychological safety and relatedness as a foundation to high-quality interactions within and between teams.

Information sharing: Fit-for-purpose interactions

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? You spend a significant amount of time in meetings every day but feel like nothing has been accomplished. You jump from one meeting to another and don’t get to think on your own until 7 p.m. You wonder why you need to attend a series of meetings where the same materials are presented over and over again. You’re exhausted.

An increasing number of organizations have begun to realize the urgency of driving ruthless meeting efficiency and of questioning whether meetings are truly required at all to share information. Live interactions can be useful for information sharing, particularly when there is an interpretive lens required to understand the information, when that information is particularly sensitive, or when leaders want to ensure there’s ample time to process it and ask questions. That said, most of us would say that most meetings are not particularly useful and often don’t accomplish their intended objective.

We have observed that many companies are moving to shorter meetings (15 to 30 minutes) rather than the standard default of one-hour meetings in an effort to drive focus and productivity. For example, Netflix launched a redesign effort to drastically improve meeting efficiency, resulting in a tightly controlled meeting protocol. Meetings cannot go beyond 30 minutes. Meetings for one-way information sharing must be canceled in favor of other mechanisms such as a memo, podcast, or vlog. Two-way information sharing during meetings is limited by having attendees review materials in advance, replacing presentations with Q&As. Early data show Netflix has been able to reduce the number of meetings by more than 65 percent, and more than 85 percent of employees favor the approach.

Making meeting time a scarce resource is another strategy organizations are using to improve the quality of information sharing and other types of interactions occurring in a meeting setting. Some companies have implemented no-meeting days. In Japan, Microsoft’s “Work Life Choice Challenge” adopted a four-day workweek, reduced the time employees spend in meetings—and boosted productivity by 40 percent. 1 Bill Chappell, “4-day workweek boosted workers’ productivity by 40%, Microsoft Japan says,” NPR, November 4, 2019, npr.org. Similarly, Shopify uses “No Meeting Wednesdays” to enable employees to devote time to projects they are passionate about and to promote creative thinking. 2 Amy Elisa Jackson, “Feedback & meeting-free Wednesdays: How Shopify beats the competition,” Glassdoor, December 5, 2018, glassdoor.com. And Moveline’s product team dedicates every Tuesday to “Maker Day,” an opportunity to create and solve complex problems without the distraction of meetings. 3 Rebecca Greenfield, “Why your office needs a maker day,” Fast Company , April 17, 2014, fastcompany.com.

Finally, no meeting could be considered well scoped without considering who should participate, as there are real financial and transaction costs to meeting participation. Leaders should treat time spent in meetings as seriously as companies treat financial capital. Every leader in every organization should ask the following questions before attending any meeting: What’s this meeting for? What’s my role? Can I shorten this meeting by limiting live information sharing and focusing on discussion and decision making? We encourage you to excuse yourself from meetings if you don’t have a role in influencing the outcome and to instead get a quick update over email. If you are not essential, the meeting will still be successful (possibly more so!) without your presence. Try it and see what happens.

High-quality, focused interactions can improve productivity, speed, and innovation within any organization—and drive better business performance. We hope the above insights have inspired you to try some new techniques to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration within your organization.

Aaron De Smet is a senior partner in McKinsey’s New Jersey office; Caitlin Hewes is a consultant in the Atlanta office; Mengwei Luo is an associate partner in the New York office; J.R. Maxwell is a partner in the Washington, DC, office; and Patrick Simon is a partner in the Munich office.

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