Research resources

Research Resources

A practical starting point for planning credible research and producing a clear, verifiable document.

A repeatable research workflow

Good research is easier to evaluate when each decision—from the question to the final citation—can be explained and checked.

These resources provide general guidance. Your discipline, institution, ethics committee, funder, or publisher may require additional procedures.

Develop a researchable question

Move from a broad topic to a question that identifies the population or material, central concept, context, and feasible scope. Test whether the question can be answered with evidence available within your time and ethical constraints.

Record inclusion and exclusion decisions early so the project does not expand without control.

Plan and document the literature search

List synonyms, related concepts, abbreviations, and spelling variants.
Combine concepts with appropriate Boolean operators.
Search more than one relevant database or scholarly index.
Record database names, dates, exact queries, filters, and result counts.
Use backward and forward citation searching for important studies.

Evaluate sources

Consider author expertise, publication venue, review process, method, sample, data availability, conflicts of interest, corrections or retractions, and how directly the source supports your claim.

A highly cited source is not automatically correct, and a recent source is not automatically better. Read beyond titles and abstracts before relying on a study.

Keep traceable research notes

Separate quotations, paraphrases, summaries, and your own ideas. Store page numbers and identifiers with each note. This reduces accidental plagiarism and makes later verification much faster.

Manage citations and references

Choose the required citation style before final formatting. Use a reference manager when possible, but verify imported metadata, capitalization, names, dates, page ranges, URLs, and DOIs.

Run a two-way audit: every in-text citation should match a reference, and every reference should be cited. Prism Nexus can assist with this check, but ambiguous records still require review.

Protect ethics, consent, and data

Obtain required ethical approval before collecting data.
Use clear consent procedures and minimize personal data.
Separate identifiers from research data where feasible.
Control access, backups, retention, and disposal.
Describe exclusions, transformations, and analysis decisions transparently.

Report methods and limitations transparently

Explain what was planned, what occurred, what changed, and why. Report missing data, exclusions, uncertainty, negative findings, and limitations. Transparency makes a study more useful even when results are inconclusive.

Move from research to the final document

Create an evidence-to-claim outline before drafting. Revise the argument before sentence-level polishing, then complete citation and formatting checks.

Continue with the Academic Writing Guide, review the FAQ, or begin a Prism Nexus analysis.

Turn your research into a polished document

Analyze writing quality and research integrity while keeping every finding available for review.

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