How to Start a Research Project: Creating a Research Question

A research question is the focus of your research project. It is the thesis of your paper or the point of your presentation. You will likely need to do some preliminary research before committing to a research question. Here are some requirements of a good research question:

• Research questions cannot be answered with "yes" or "no".
• Research questions can be researched.
• Research questions have an appropriate "scope" for the size of the research project.
  • A small research paper shouldn't have a research question with a giant scope: How does preventative healthcare get planned?
  • A small research paper should have a research question with a manageable scope: How do preventative care programs for type II diabetes in Alabaman clinics get advertised?

In this example, we narrowed the scope of our initial research question in a few ways:

• Type: What do we want to look at preventative care for? We want to look at preventative care for type II diabetes.
• Place: Where do we want to focus on? Do we want to look at preventative care practices in the whole world? No. We can look at Alabaman clinics.
• Action: What parts of planning do we want to focus on? We care about advertising. 

Sometimes, research questions need to change slightly after you have done some research. If you were not able to find any useful resources for the example research question, then you could try changing the scope.

Example: If you cannot find anything specific to Alabaman clinics, then you could change that part of your research question to "United States clinics" or "Alabaman healthcare providers."

Still stuck? Please check Monash University's Developing Research Questions guide.

A database is searched by creating a search query. A search query is the combination of search terms, filters, and code that you type or select before clicking the search button.

• Search terms are the words or phrases you want the search feature to look for.
  • Different databases search different parts of the text. Some databases, like JSTOR or newspaper collections, only do a full-text search. Their search features will only pull items that have those phrases in the actual text.
  • Other databases, like Academic Search complete, will search the actual text and the description of the text.
  • Many databases have multiple textboxes where you can enter multiple search terms at once. You do not need to put a term in every textbox.
• Filters are selections built into the search feature. You can choose different filters to narrow down your results. Common filters are by publication date or by language.
• Code includes any special terms or punctuation to add to your search. Some search features might not understand every code.
  • ? or * are commonly use to truncate your searches. This means that a search for: read* will really search for any word that starts with read. The articles you get shown might contain the words "read," "readers," or "readmit".

This is an example of a search in Academic Search Complete:

This is an example of a search in JSTOR: