Find a post
Identifying & Planning Research
Many researchers see theory and philosophy as abstract and intimidating. In this interview, Peter Adams explains why they are essential to strong research, how they shape better questions and methods, and why their importance is growing in the age of AI.
Whether you’re tackling a systematic review for your own research project, or supporting students, this recent Sage Campus webinar is an essential watch.
Dr Gemma Cherry and Dr Michelle Maden, co-authors of Doing a Systematic Review: A Student’s Guide, break down the rigorous process into 10 clear, manageable steps. You’ll learn the difference between systematic and scoping reviews, the critical need for a registered protocol, and how to craft a focused question using frameworks like PICO.
There are some perennial challenges to doing a research project that all of us have faced: formulating a research question, wrestling with paradigmatic assumptions, keeping on track of a multi-year project. The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project has been helping students (and supervisors) for more than 20 years. But in a post-pandemic world with the transformations being wrought by artificial intelligence, datafication, and the rise and fall of social media platforms, there are new challenges facing researchers.
While progress has been made, social and systemic biases continue to produce inequities in scholarly reference lists, citational indexes, and even journal metrics. This guidance outlines steps that researchers can take toward achieving more inclusive and equitable scholarly citational practice.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Research Design and Planning video collection, a powerful new resource designed to equip researchers with the essential tools and insights to craft high-impact research projects. Whether you're a student, academic, or professional researcher, this collection is your go-to guide for mastering the art and science of research design.
Undertaking a research project such as a dissertation or capstone can be one of the most rewarding aspects of a student’s degree programme. It provides them with the opportunity to apply what they have learned in their course to explore a topic of personal interest. It also enables them to develop independent research skills, a sought after competence among many employers. However, for many students, the experience can also feel daunting and at times, overwhelming.
Jump to
Research Methods at Sage
Find resources to answer your research methods and statistics questions.
Independence with Impact Report 2024
Discover how we're advancing disciplines, cultivating critical thinking skills, and driving social change in our latest report.
Research Skills
Research methods and skills can make all the difference to student success, yet they are not always taught explicitly in the classroom. Sage Campus helps close that gap with scaffolded learning that builds confidence step by step, equipping learners with the practical skills they need to thrive in their studies and beyond.
This blog is the seventh, and penultimate post, in a follow-on to our 2021 “The future of computational social science is Black” series, about a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science organized by Howard University and Mathematica. It continues to bring the power of computational social science to the issues of systemic racism and inequality in America. This marks the third iteration of the successful SICSS model being hosted by a Historically Black College or University.
This blog post is the sixth of eight in a follow-on to our 2021 “The future of computational social science is Black” series, about a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science organized by Howard University and Mathematica. It continues to bring the power of computational social science to the issues of systemic racism and inequality in America. This marks the third iteration of the successful SICSS model being hosted by a Historically Black College or University.
Latanya Sweeney, scholar of technology science, Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and director and founder of the Public Interest Tech Lab, delivered the keynote address for SICSS-Howard/Mathematica 2023.
Research Questions
Do you think about research questions as an insider, outsider, or somewhere in between? Why is positionality important in online research?
Julianne Cheek and Elise Øby, co-authors of the book Research Design: Why Thinking About Design Matters, discuss how to make decisions about what qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods data to collect and how to do so. This post is the third of a three-part series of posts that feature ten author interviews.
Julianne Cheek and Elise Øby, co-authors of the book Research Design: Why Thinking About Design Matters, discuss how to make decisions about methodology in this collection of video interviews. This post is the second of a three-part series of posts that feature ten author interviews.
We need to think about research before we design and conduct it.
Julianne Cheek and Elise Øby, co-authors of the book Research Design: Why Thinking About Design Matters, discuss the first three chapters in these video interviews:
Chapter 1 – Research Design: What You Need to Think About and Why
Chapter 2 – Ethical Issues in Research Design
Chapter 3 – Developing Your Research Questions
Find all the posts from the January 2021 focus on research questions.
Want to learn more about research questions? Find multidisciplinary articles and chapters, videos and cases, on SAGE Research Methods
Dr. Gary Burkholder offers practical advice for anyone trying to develop a research question for a new project.
Think about the relationship between practical problems and research questions.
Find a selection of open access articles about processes researchers use to define questions.
Basic tips for identifying research questions.
Critical Thinking
How and why should you argue in academic writing? Learn more from Dr. Alastair Bonnett, author of How to Argue.
How can critical thinking skills help you write more precisely? In this post Dr. Alex Baratta offers some practical tips.
Find a collection of open-access articles about ways to apply critical and creative thinking in your research.
In this research conversation with Janet Salmons, Julianne Cheek and Elise Øby discuss the importance of an iterative, design-thinking approach to research.
Ethical research practice does not stop with the conclusion of the study. Importantly, ethical research practice comes to fruition in academic writing.
Tom Chatfield and Janet Salmons discuss critical and creative thinking in this updated post from the archives. Both kinds of thinking are crucial for research, especially when the study uses new methods.
Nowhere is the symbiotic relationship of creative and critical thinking more apparent than in the practices inherent to research design, conduct, and dissemination.
Tom Chatfield offers 10 suggestions, with 10 videos to help you become a better critical thinker.
Literature Review
While progress has been made, social and systemic biases continue to produce inequities in scholarly reference lists, citational indexes, and even journal metrics. This guidance outlines steps that researchers can take toward achieving more inclusive and equitable scholarly citational practice.
Effectively conveying the reality of social inequalities can be challenging. Data visualization, however, serves as a powerful instrument to facilitate this crucial task. Sage’s Data Visualization multimedia collection offers expert guidance on techniques, tools, and best practices to support researchers in leveraging the power of data viz in their research.
Join Gary Thomas, author of ‘How to Do Your Literature Review’ as he discusses questions which arose in his recent webinar, ‘What is a Literature Review in the Age of AI?’. A link to the webinar recording can be found at the end of this blog post.
The new AI tools for conducting a literature review provide a remarkable resource both for professional researchers and students. They can rapidly scan millions of papers, provide digests and summaries in seconds, link cognate literature, and even draw maps of the literature showing how one piece relates to another.
The process for researching literature on research methods is somewhat different from the process used for researching literature about the topic, problem, or questions. What should we keep in mind when selecting methods literature?
Critical appraisal of research papers is a component of everyday academic life, whether as a student as part of an assignment, as a researcher as part of a literature review or as a teacher preparing a lecture. Learn more from this post.
Missed the Methodspace webinar “Analyzing Published Literature Across Paradigms and Disciplines”? View it here and find related resources.
Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, co-researcher for “The impact of algorithmically driven recommendation systems on music consumption and production - a literature review,” offers insights about the literature review process.
What is the difference between a literature review and a state of the science review? See an article by Dr. Joan Dodgson.
In this interview David Antons and Oliver Salge discuss the roles humans and machines can take to plan and conduct computational literature reviews.
In this interview Dr. Marc Anderson explains how and why to use citation context analysis to track impact of scholarly publications over time.
Dr. Brian Fox explains why systematicity is important in literature reviews.
In the article “Theorizing Through Literature Reviews: The Miner-Prospector Continuum” Dermot Breslin and Caroline Gatrell pose an intriguing question: do you approach the literature review as a miner or as a prospector? They discuss options in an interview.
How do decide what literature you need for a review? See this post featuring an interview Martin Hiebl and related open-access article about sample selection.
Garima Sharma and Pratima (Tima) Bansal discuss ways to engage with managers, professionals, or practitioners to learn from the literature using a systematic review process.
In this interview Dr. Herman Aguinis and Dr. Ravi Ramani discuss the article they wrote with Dr. Nawaf Alabduljader, “Best-Practice Recommendations for Producers, Evaluators, and Users of Methodological Literature Reviews.”
Find tips for organizing and synthesizing methodological sources for your literature review.
How can you use published literature as data? In this Methodspace interview Dr. David Denyer explains how and why to use review research.
A critical step in planning and designing research entails reviewing literature to situate it in a research tradition.
Want to design and plan a review study? Find open-access examples of systematic reviews, meta-syntheses, meta–analyses, and integrative literature reviews. Also, learn more with related SAGE books.
Review research has become a credible and legitimate form of scientific inquiry in various fields of science including management and organizational sciences. Find open-access articles with practical advice about planning a review study.
Dr. Helen Kara offers suggestions for taking an ethical approach to your literature review.
This blog post is the eighth, and final, post in a follow-on to our 2021 “The future of computational social science is Black” series, about a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science organized by Howard University and Mathematica. It continues to bring the power of computational social science to the issues of systemic racism and inequality in America. This marks the third iteration of the successful SICSS model being hosted by a Historically Black College or University.