how to write research project plan

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A Research Guide
Research Paper Guide

How to Write a Research Plan

Research plan definition
Purpose of a research plan
Research plan structure
Step-by-step writing guide

Tips for creating a research plan

Research plan examples

Research plan: definition and significance

What is the purpose of a research plan.

Bridging gaps in the existing knowledge related to their subject.
Reinforcing established research about their subject.
Introducing insights that contribute to subject understanding.

Research plan structure & template

Introduction.

What is the existing knowledge about the subject?
What gaps remain unanswered?
How will your research enrich understanding, practice, and policy?

Literature review

Expected results.

Express how your research can challenge established theories in your field.
Highlight how your work lays the groundwork for future research endeavors.
Emphasize how your work can potentially address real-world problems.

5 Steps to crafting an effective research plan

Step 1: define the project purpose, step 2: select the research method, step 3: manage the task and timeline, step 4: write a summary, step 5: plan the result presentation.

Brainstorm Collaboratively: Initiate a collective brainstorming session with peers or experts. Outline the essential questions that warrant exploration and answers within your research.
Prioritize and Feasibility: Evaluate the list of questions and prioritize those that are achievable and important. Focus on questions that can realistically be addressed.
Define Key Terminology: Define technical terms pertinent to your research, fostering a shared understanding. Ensure that terms like “church” or “unreached people group” are well-defined to prevent ambiguity.
Organize your approach: Once well-acquainted with your institution’s regulations, organize each aspect of your research by these guidelines. Allocate appropriate word counts for different sections and components of your research paper.

Research plan example

Writing a Research Paper
Research Paper Title
Research Paper Sources
Research Paper Problem Statement
Research Paper Thesis Statement
Hypothesis for a Research Paper
Research Question
Research Paper Outline
Research Paper Summary
Research Paper Prospectus
Research Paper Proposal
Research Paper Format
Research Paper Styles
AMA Style Research Paper
MLA Style Research Paper
Chicago Style Research Paper
APA Style Research Paper
Research Paper Structure
Research Paper Cover Page
Research Paper Abstract
Research Paper Introduction
Research Paper Body Paragraph
Research Paper Literature Review
Research Paper Background
Research Paper Methods Section
Research Paper Results Section
Research Paper Discussion Section
Research Paper Conclusion
Research Paper Appendix
Research Paper Bibliography
APA Reference Page
Annotated Bibliography
Bibliography vs Works Cited vs References Page
Research Paper Types
What is Qualitative Research

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Research Plan: What Is It & How To Write It [with Templates]

In today's fast-paced world, comprehensive data and analytics are crucial for businesses and institutions to streamline their decision-making processes. Therefore, to gather truly valuable insights, a meticulously designed research proposal is necessary. This is where many research teams fall short, focusing only on general research planning instead of creating a holistic research plan.Basic research planning encompasses only the initial stages of a research project, focusing on defining research questions, timelines, objectives, and methods. While crucial, it offers only a rudimentary outline of the research approach.

On the other hand, a well-executed research plan is a detailed, systematic, and structured document that outlines every aspect of the project. It ensures a focused, organized, and rigorous approach that maximizes the quality and reliability of the research findings.

What Is a Research Plan?

A research plan is a comprehensive document that outlines the entirety of your research project. It details the research process, from defining the problem statement and research objectives to selecting the research method and outlining the expected outcomes. This plan serves as a blueprint for your research activities, ensuring a focused and efficient approach.

The objective, methodology, and method depend on the context of your research. For instance, social media or UX research plans may focus on qualitative research methodologies , while a scientific research strategy might involve formulating hypotheses and conducting experiments.

How To Write a Research Plan in 6 Steps

Crafting an effective research plan empowers you to conduct a focused and productive investigation. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you create a plan tailored to your specific needs:

Define the Purpose of Your Project

As a starting point for your research plan, you need to clearly articulate what you aim to achieve with your research. What questions are you seeking to answer? What problem are you trying to solve? Properly defining the project’s purpose ensures your research remains focused and avoids scope creep.

Identify Research Objectives

After you have defined what the main goal for the project is, you will have to identify the specific steps or objectives needed to achieve your goal. This will help you streamline your process in a more efficient way.

Noting down individual objectives can be especially helpful if a large group is working on the project, as they can allocate tasks more effectively according to each person’s expertise. Even if a single person is conducting the research, the identified steps can assist them in sorting tasks according to their priority.

Develop a Hypothesis

In some research projects, you might benefit from developing a hypothesis , which, in basic terms, is a tentative prediction about the outcome of your investigation. The research plan will then include the tests and methodologies to help accurately confirm or disprove the original hypothesis.

Choose a Suitable Research Method and Sample

Choose the research methods best suited to gather the kind of data you need. Qualitative methods like focus groups, user interviews, and usability testing provide rich, in-depth insights. Quantitative methods like close-ended questionnaires offer broader data points.

A combination of both quantitative and qualitative research methods can be used if you want to take a more holistic approach. Next, identify your research sample. Define the demographics of your ideal participant and the sample size you need to come to get relevant insights.

Recruit Participants and Distribute Tasks

If you’re the one leading the research study, recruiting participants can help simplify the tasks. You can divide all the work according to each person’s proficiency, allowing you to prioritize the managerial tasks of your plan, such as how you will display your results.

Set a Realistic Timeline

Establish a clear timeline for each stage of your research, allocating sufficient time for tasks like data collection, analysis, and reporting. It is best practice to allow for extra time when noting down each task’s deadline in case a team member isn’t able to meet it or in case of any unexpected developments. A timeline is crucial even if you’re working alone, as it allows you to organize your time accordingly.

Why Do You Need a Research Plan?

A research plan is more than just a document. It's a roadmap for all your research activities. A well-defined plan helps you stay organized and focused on achieving your objectives.

The plan serves as an effective tool for transparent communication among team members and stakeholders. It also makes it easier to track the progress of research goals, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

7 Marketing Plan Templates Built and Used by Leading Companies

Actual case studies of effective research planning processes can give you valuable insight. Here are seven plan templates with different use cases created and used by renowned companies:

1. Jobs To Be Done User Research Guide at Replit

Tabish Gilani, Director Head of Product at Replit, created a user research interview guide to teach employees how to conduct interviews efficiently using the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) Framework . It is an excellent resource for companies that need to generate large-scale interview campaigns where users are “difficult to find.”

The interviews were meant to help get a more comprehensive outlook on Replit users worldwide regarding who they are, what they do, and why. The framework especially helped them with effective segmentation, as Replit is used globally for several different reasons. Therefore, according to geography, unique patterns and behaviors would be found that basic usage data cannot provide insight into.

Through the JTBD framework, they were able to interview users to pinpoint product themes to help them better understand their Ideal User Profile. This included the four forces influencing the point of view of the product, two of which are pull forces that attract the user and two push forces that repel them. They also specified four broad segmentations of behavioral, geographical, psychographic, and demographic to help them find relevant interviewees.

2. Design Methods Research Planning for Facebook Audience Insights

Behzod Sirjani, the Senior User Experience Researcher at Facebook, took an unconventional research approach that successfully helped them redesign the Audience Insight tool, which didn’t get great feedback when it was launched.

When designing the research plan , they prioritized making it fun and qualitative to get a subjective view of what users would want the ad tool to look like and why. These answers would also give a good insight into what competitors are doing right without having to go through competitive analysis.

Behzod didn’t just rely on interviews to get customer feedback. They took the approach of giving the user a blank page and marker to draw what they think will be useful for them. Then, they can ask why that will help them and delve into deeper conversations. This is great if you do not want to restrict answers.

They also kept rolling recruitment to reach higher-value customers and not spend excessive time with each. This approach worked as the team did not want empirical research but points that could help them learn and adapt to user preferences.

3. Enterprise App Management Research - Discussion Guide at Slack

Head of Research Operations at Slack, Behzod Sirjani, created an effective discussion guide used when conducting interviews with Slack Enterprise App Admin customers. This is especially helpful for B2B contexts, which was the case here.

The first part of the discussion focuses on warm-up questions to orient the participant and build a rapport. This allows the interviewer to gauge the answering style and adapt their questions accordingly for higher effectiveness.

The second part is designed to get context regarding the company and processes. The third section consists of the core questions, which are meant to take the most amount of time. This part of the discussion is where the interviewer delves deeper into how the product is managed and used and any challenges faced. At the end, the guide gives prompts on how to wrap up the discussion and get any information that may have been missed or could be discussed further.

4. Research Plan - Concept Testing at Niagahoster

Muhammad Aditya Ardiansyah, UX Researcher at Niagahoster, curated a research plan that is incredibly useful for people who want to gain insight into a feature. The plan focused mainly on getting insights about the concept and conducting usability testing.

The team first created hypotheses to validate if their feature is easy to use and useful. Their research plan also highlighted the in-depth process of creating two profile types that would include three participants each. The methods will involve in-depth interviews and moderated usability testing research to get a holistic idea of the attitudes and behaviors of users towards the product.

To incentivize participation, the research team gave a reward in the form of a discount voucher for their product, company merchandise, or money.

5. Automatic Outreach Research Process and Tracker at Coda

Coda Product Manager Matt Woods used the latest management software to help automate the process of reaching out to participants and tracking their feedback. This makes the guide particularly useful for those who want to schedule calls on scale.

This innovative method allowed for a streamlined interviewing process. It has proven to help the Coda product team get valuable insights regarding customer pains and improved user intuition.

6. Automatically Scheduling Customer Interviews at VEED

Thomas Christensen, Senior Product Manager, Growth at VEED.IO created a system that allowed them to conduct continuous interview research sessions . This was to improve user intuition and reveal the pains, desires, and unmet needs of their target market.

They segmented users into three groups:

“Habit users” who make videos every week
“Aha users” who just created their first video
New users who did not make a video at all.

This allowed them to cater their outreach methods accordingly. For example, the first two types of users were sent recruitment emails. The third type was reached out via the app itself.

This approach also helped personalize the email and messages to get more responses. This guide is excellent if you want to scale your outreach process in a convenient way.

7. Qualitative and Quantitative Design Research Approach at Reforge

Lead Product Designer at Reforge, Ali Riehle, created a diagram to help guide their cross-functional research project . This spectacular guide can help you create a research plan that uses both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The structured approach using the diagram allowed each stage and task to be distinguished, which helped streamline communication and collaboration across the three different pods. The research outcomes heavily and positively contributed to the creation of Reforge’s strategy for 2024.

Click here to discover more of our Research Plan artifacts.

How To Customize a Research Plan Template

When selecting a template to customize for your research project, make sure it covers all essential components, such as:

Introduction: Briefly introduce the research topic and target audience.
Background: Define the problem or opportunity you're addressing.
Objectives: Clearly outline your specific research goals.
Methodology: Explain how you'll collect and analyze data.
Timeline: Set realistic deadlines for each research stage.
Expected Outcomes: Describe the anticipated results of your research.
Communication Plan: Outline how you'll present your research findings.

Explore Artifacts of All Kinds

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Topics Related to Research Plans

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User Segmentation

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Illustration of an aerial view of a man at a desk with papers in a question mark shape, coffee, biscuits and office supplies on a yellow background.

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’).