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Communities can help identify, develop, refine, and prioritize research questions, particularly when lived or local knowledge is important to deciding what deserves investigation. Community priorities still need to be translated into feasible, ethical, and scientifically answerable research questions.
Read Guide →Primary and secondary data are not simply two ways of obtaining the same evidence. Whether you collect new data or work with existing data changes which parts of the study you can design yourself and which constraints you inherit.
Read Guide →Using an established measure can save substantial development work, but an existing instrument is not automatically suitable for every study. Learn when adaptation or new measure development may be justified and what each choice requires.
Read Guide →A research protocol should contain enough information to explain why the study is being conducted and exactly how it will be carried out. Its contents should reflect the study design and applicable requirements rather than a universal template.
Read Guide →An ethics committee may request a change intended to protect participants that also creates a methodological problem. Learn how to identify the underlying ethical concern, explain the methodological consequence, and propose a defensible alternative.
Read Guide →A good response to ethics committee comments makes it easy to see what was requested, what you changed, where you changed it, and why. Learn how to prepare a clear point-by-point response and coordinated revision package.
Read Guide →Participants need enough relevant information to understand what participation involves and why they might or might not want to take part. The exact required information varies by study and governing framework.
Read Guide →Potential participants need enough relevant information to make an informed decision, but not every detail has to appear in the first recruitment message. The amount, timing, and organization of disclosure depend on whether researchers are recruiting interest, seeking informed consent, or using an ethics-approved alteration of consent.
Read Guide →An organization cannot make voluntary research participation compulsory simply by calling it a course requirement or workplace task. The answer depends first on whether the activity is actually research, then on the applicable consent rules, alternatives, penalties, and ethics-review framework.
Read Guide →Course credit can be used as a research incentive, but students must not be placed in a position where research is effectively the only practical way to earn the credit. A comparable non-research alternative and protection against academic penalties are central to voluntariness.
Read Guide →Students offered course credit for research should have an equitable non-research way to earn the same credit. The alternative should require reasonably comparable time and effort without making research participation the easier or academically safer choice.
Read Guide →Researchers should not collect identifying information simply because it might be useful later. Each identifier should serve a defensible research or operational purpose, and the appropriate amount depends on what the study actually needs to accomplish.
Read Guide →A good research debrief does more than reveal that deception occurred. It should explain the study’s actual purpose, identify what was false or withheld, explain why the alteration was necessary, correct important misconceptions, and communicate any participant options required by the governing ethics framework.
Read Guide →A research gap describes what existing knowledge does not adequately answer, while a research problem defines the specific issue your study will investigate. Learn how the two concepts connect without treating them as interchangeable.
Read Guide →Reference managers can do much more than generate bibliographies. Learn how to use Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, and similar tools to capture accurate references, organize literature, manage PDFs, take useful notes, cite while writing, and protect your research library.
Read Guide →You can conduct academic research without a reference manager, but manual reference management becomes increasingly difficult as your sources, projects, and citations grow. Here is how to decide when using one is worth the effort.
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