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Writing a Research Strategy

This page is focused on providing practical tips and suggestions for preparing The Research Strategy, the primary component of an application's Research Plan along with the Specific Aims. The guidance on this page is primarily geared towards an R01-style application, however, much of it is useful for other grant types as well.

Developing the Research Strategy

The primary audience for your application is your peer review group. When writing your Research Strategy, your goal is to present a well-organized, visually appealing, and readable description of your proposed project and the rationale for pursuing it. Your writing should be streamlined and organized so your reviewers can readily grasp the information. If it's a key point, repeat it, then repeat it again. Add more emphasis by putting the text in bold , or bold italics . If writing is not your forte, get help.  For more information, please visit  W riting For Reviewers .

How to Organize the Research Strategy Section

How to organize a Research Strategy is largely up to the applicant. Start by following the NIH application instructions and guidelines for formatting attachments such as the research plan section.

It is generally structured as follows:

Significance

For  Preliminary Studies (for new applications) or a Progress Report (for renewal and revision applications).

• You can either include preliminary studies or progress report information as a subsection of Approach or integrate it into any or all of the three main sections.
• If you do the latter, be sure to mark the information clearly, for example, with a bold subhead.

 Helpful tips to consider when formatting:

• Organize using bold headers or an outline or numbering system—or both—that are used consistently throughout.
• Start each section with the appropriate header: Significance, Innovation, or Approach.
• Organize the Approach section around the Specific Aims.

For most applications, you need to address Rigor ous Study Design  by describing the experimental design and methods you propose and how they will achieve robust and unbiased results. See the NIH guidance for elaboration on the 4 major areas of rigor and transparency emphasized in grant review.  These requirements apply to research grant, career development, fellowship, and training applications.

Tips for Drafting Sections of the Research Strategy

Although you will emphasize your project's significance throughout the application, the Significance section should give the most details. The farther removed your reviewers are from your field, the more information you'll need to provide on basic biology, importance of the area, research opportunities, and new findings. Reviewing the potentially relevant study section rosters may give you some ideas as to general reviewer expertise. You will also need to describe the prior and preliminary studies that provide a strong scientific rationale for pursuing the proposed studies, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses in the rigor and transparency of these key studies.

This section gives you the chance to explain how your application is conceptually and/or technically innovative. Some examples as to how you might do this could include but not limited to:

• Demonstrate the proposed research is new and unique, e.g., explores new scientific avenues, has a novel hypothesis, will create new knowledge.
• Explain how the proposed work can refine, improve, or propose a new application of an existing concept or method.

If your proposal is paradigm-shifting or challenges commonly held beliefs, be sure that you include sufficient evidence in your preliminary data to convince reviewers, including strong rationale, data supporting the approach, and clear feasibility. Your job is to make the reviewers feel confident that the risk is worth taking.

For projects predominantly focused on innovation and outside-the-box research, investigators may wish to consider mechanisms other than R01s for example (e.g., exploratory/developmental research (R21) grants, NIH Director's Pioneer Award Program (DP1), and NIH Director's New Innovator Award Program (DP2).

The Approach section is where the experimental design is described. Expect your assigned reviewers to scrutinize your approach: they will want to know what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, and whether you can do it. NIH data show that of the peer review criteria, approach has the highest correlation with the overall impact score. Importantly, elements of rigorous study design should be addressed in this section, such as plans for minimization of bias (e.g. methods for blinding and treatment randomization) and consideration of relevant biological variables. Likewise, be sure to lay out a plan for alternative experiments and approaches in case you get uninterpretable or surprising results, and also consider limitations of the study and alternative interpretations. Point out any procedures, situations, or materials that may be hazardous to personnel and precautions to be exercised. A full discussion on the use of select agents should appear in the Select Agent Research attachment.  Consider including a timeline demonstrating anticipated completion of the Aims. 

Here are some pointers to consider when organizing your Approach section:

• Enter a bold header for each Specific Aim.
• Under each aim, describe the experiments.
• If you get result X, you will follow pathway X; if you get result Y, you will follow pathway Y.
• Consider illustrating this with a flowchart.

Preliminary Studies

If submitting a new application to a NOFO that allows preliminary data, it is strongly encouraged to include preliminary studies.  Preliminary studies demonstrate competency in the methods and interpretation. Well-designed and robust preliminary studies also serve to provide a strong scientific rationale for the proposed follow-up experiments. Reviewers also use preliminary studies together with the biosketches to assess the investigator review criterion, which reflects the competence of the research team. Provide alternative interpretations to your data to show reviewers you've thought through problems in-depth and are prepared to meet future challenges. As noted above, preliminary data can be put anywhere in the Research Strategy, but just make sure reviewers will be able to distinguish it from the proposed studies. Alternatively, it can be a separate section with its own header.

Progress Reports

If applying for a renewal or a revision (a competing supplement to an existing grant), include a progress report for reviewers.

Create a header so reviewers can easily find it and include the following information:

• Project period beginning and end dates.
• Summary of the importance and robustness of the completed findings in relation to the Specific Aims.
• Account of published and unpublished results, highlighting progress toward achieving your Specific Aims.  

Other Helpful Tips

Referencing publications.

References show breadth of knowledge of the field and provide a scientific foundation for your application. If a critical work is omitted, reviewers may assume the applicant is not aware of it or deliberately ignoring it.

Throughout the application, reference all relevant publications for the concepts underlying your research and your methods. Remember the strengths and weaknesses in the rigor of the key studies you cite for justifying your proposal will need to be discussed in the Significance and/or Approach sections.

Read more about Bibliography and References Cited at Additional Application Elements .

Graphics can illustrate complex information in a small space and add visual interest to your application. Including schematics, tables, illustrations, graphs, and other types of graphics can enhance applications. Consider adding a timetable or flowchart to illustrate your experimental plan, including decision trees with alternative experimental pathways to help your reviewers understand your plans.

Video may enhance your application beyond what graphics alone can achieve. If you plan to send one or more videos, you'll need to meet certain requirements and include key information in your Research Strategy. State in your cover letter that a video will be included in your application (don't attach your files to the application). After you apply and get assignment information from the Commons, ask your assigned Scientific Review Officer (SRO) how your business official should send the files. Your video files are due at least one month before the peer review meeting.

However, you can't count on all reviewers being able to see or hear video, so you'll want to be strategic in how you incorporate it into your application by taking the following steps:

• Caption any narration in the video.
• Include key images from the video
• Write a description of the video, so the text would make sense even without the video.

Tracking for Your Budget

As you design your experiments, keep a running tab of the following essential data:

• Who. A list of people who will help (for the Key Personnel section later).
• What. A list of equipment and supplies for the experiments
• Time. Notes on how long each step takes. Timing directly affects the budget as well as how many Specific Aims can realistically be achieved.

Jotting this information down will help when Creating a Budget  and complete other sections later.

Review and Finalize Your Research Plan

Critically review the research plan through the lens of a reviewer to identify potential questions or weak spots.

Enlist others to review your application with a fresh eye. Include people who aren't familiar with the research to make sure the proposed work is clear to someone outside the field.

When finalizing the details of the Research Strategy, revisit and revise the Specific Aims as needed. Please see Writing Specific Aims . 

comments Want to contact NINDS staff? Please visit our Find Your NINDS Program Officer page to learn more about contacting Program Officer, Grants Management Specialists, Scientific Review Officers, and Health Program Specialists.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

VII. Researched Writing

7.3 Developing a Research Strategy

Deborah Bernnard; Greg Bobish; Jenna Hecker; Irina Holden; Allison Hosier; Trudi Jacobson; Tor Loney; Daryl Bullis; and Sarah LeMire

Sarah’s art history professor just assigned the course project and Sarah is delighted that it isn’t the typical research paper. Rather, it involves putting together a website to help readers understand a topic. It will certainly help Sarah get a grasp on the topic herself. Learning by attempting to teach others, she agrees, might be a good idea. The professor wants the website to be written for people who are interested in the topic and with backgrounds similar to the students in the course. Sarah likes that a target audience is defined, and since she has a good idea of what her friends might understand and what they would need more help with, she thinks it will be easier to know what to include in her site…well, at least easier than writing a paper for an expert like her professor.

An interesting feature of this course is that the professor has formed the students into teams. Sarah wasn’t sure she liked this idea at the beginning, but it seems to be working out okay. Sarah’s team has decided that their topic for this website will be 19 th century women painters. Her teammate Chris seems concerned: “Isn’t that an awfully big topic?” The team checks with the professor who agrees they would be taking on far more than they could successfully explain on their website. He suggests they develop a draft thesis statement to help them focus, and after several false starts, they come up with:

The involvement of women painters in the Impressionist movement had an effect upon the subjects portrayed.

They decide this sounds more manageable. Because Sarah doesn’t feel comfortable on the technical aspects of setting up the website, she offers to start locating resources that will help them to develop the site’s content. The next time the class meets, Sarah tells her teammates what she has done so far:

“I thought I’d start with some scholarly sources, since they should be helpful, right? I put a search into the online catalog for the library, but nothing came up! The library should have books on this topic, shouldn’t it? I typed the search in exactly as we have it in our thesis statement. That was so frustrating. Since that didn’t work, I tried Google, and put in the search. I got over 8 million results, but when I looked over the ones on the first page, they didn’t seem very useful. One was about the feminist art movement in the 1960s, not during the Impressionist period. The results all seemed to have the words I typed highlighted, but most really weren’t useful. I am sorry I don’t have much to show you. Do you think we should change our topic?”

Alisha suggests that Sarah talk with a reference librarian . She mentions that a librarian came to talk to one of her other classes about doing research, and it was really helpful. Alisha thinks that maybe Sarah shouldn’t have entered the entire thesis statement as the search, and maybe she should have tried databases to find articles. The team decides to brainstorm all the search tools and resources they can think of.

Here’s what they came up with:

Brainstormed List of Search Tools and Resources

Based on your experience, do you see anything you would add?

Sarah and her team think that their list is pretty good. They decide to take it further and list the advantages and limitations of each search tool, at least as far as they can determine.

Brainstormed Advantages and Disadvantages of Search Tools and Resources

Alisha suggests that Sarah should show the worksheet to a librarian and volunteers to go with her. The librarian, Mr. Harrison, says they have made a really good start, but he can fill them in on some other search strategies that will help them to focus on their topic. He asks if Sarah and Alisha would like to learn more.

Let’s step back from this case study and think about the elements that someone doing research should plan before starting to enter search terms in Google, Wikipedia, or even a scholarly database. There is some preparation you can do to make things go much more smoothly than they have for Sarah.

Self-Reflection

As you work through your own research quests, it is very important to be self-reflective. Consider:

• What do you really need to find?
• Do you need to learn more about the general subject before you can identify the focus of your search?
• How thoroughly did you develop your search strategy?
• Did you spend enough time finding the best tools to search?
• What is going really well, so well that you’ll want to remember to do it in the future?

Another term for what you are doing is metacognition, or thinking about your thinking. Reflect on what Sarah is going through. Does some of it sound familiar based on your own experiences? You may already know some of the strategies presented here. Do you do them the same way? How does it work? What pieces are new to you? When might you follow this advice? Don’t just let the words flow over you; rather, think carefully about the explanation of the process. You may disagree with some of what you read. If you do, follow through and test both methods to see which provides better results.

Selecting Search Tools

After you have thought the planning process through more thoroughly, think about the best place to find information for your topic and for the type of paper. Part of planning to do research is determining which search tools will be the best ones to use. This applies whether you are doing scholarly research or trying to answer a question in your everyday life, such as what would be the best place to go on vacation. “Search tools” might be a bit misleading since a person might be the source of the information you need. Or it might be a web search engine , a specialized database , an association—the possibilities are endless. Often people automatically search Google first, regardless of what they are looking for. Choosing the wrong search tool may just waste your time and provide only mediocre information, whereas other sources might provide really spot-on information and quickly, too. In some cases, a carefully constructed search on Google, particularly using the advanced search option, will provide the necessary information, but other times it won’t. This is true of all sources: make an informed choice about which ones to use for a specific need.

So, how do you identify search tools? Let’s begin with a first-rate method. For academic research, talking with a librarian or your professor is a great start. They will direct you to those specialized tools that will provide access to what you need. If you ask a librarian for help, they may also show you some tips about searching in the resources. This section will cover some of the generic strategies that will work in many search tools, but a librarian can show you very specific ways to focus your search and retrieve the most useful items.

If neither your professor nor a librarian is available when you need help, take a look at the TAMU Libraries website . There is a Help button in the top right corner of the website that will direct you to assistance via phone, chat, text, and email. Under the Guides button, you’ll find class- and subject-related guides that list useful databases and other resources for particular classes and majors to assist researchers. There is also a directory of the databases the library subscribes to and the subjects they cover. Take advantage of the expertise of librarians by using such guides. Novice researchers usually don’t think of looking for this type of help and, as a consequence, often waste time.

When you are looking for non-academic material, consider who cares about this type of information. Who works with it? Who produces it or the help guides for it? Some sources are really obvious and you are already using them—for example, if you need information about the weather in London three days from now, you might check Weather.com for London’s forecast. You don’t go to a library (in person or online), and you don’t do a research database search. For other information you need, think the same way. Are you looking for anecdotal information on old railroads? Find out if there is an organization of railroad buffs. You can search on the web for this kind of information or, if you know about and have access to it, you could check the Encyclopedia of Associations. This source provides entries for all U.S. membership organizations which can quickly lead you to a potentially wonderful source of information. Librarians can point you to tools like these.

Consider Asking an Expert

Have you thought about using people, not just inanimate sources, as a way to obtain information? This might be particularly appropriate if you are working on an emerging topic or a topic with local connections. There are a variety of reasons that talking with someone will add to your research.

For personal interactions, there are other specific things you can do to obtain better results. Do some background work on the topic before contacting the person you hope to interview. The more familiarity you have with your topic and its terminology, the easier it will be to ask focused questions. Focused questions are important if you want to get into the meat of what you need. Asking general questions because you think the specifics might be too detailed rarely leads to the best information. Acknowledge the time and effort someone is taking to answer your questions, but also realize that people who are passionate about subjects enjoy sharing what they know. Take the opportunity to ask experts about sources they would recommend. One good place to start is with the librarians at the Texas A&M University Libraries. Visit the library information page for details on how to contact a librarian. [1]

Determining Search Concepts and Keywords

Once you’ve selected some good resources for your topic, and possibly talked with an expert, it is time to move on to identify words you will use to search for information on your topic in various databases and search engines. This is sometimes referred to as building a search query . When deciding what terms to use in a search, break down your topic into its main concepts. Don’t enter an entire sentence or a full question. Different databases and search engines process such queries in different ways, but many look for the entire phrase you enter as a complete unit rather than the component words. While some will focus on just the important words, such as Sarah’s Google search that you read about earlier in this chapter, the results are often still unsatisfactory. The best thing to do is to use the key concepts involved with your topic. In addition, think of synonyms or related terms for each concept. If you do this, you will have more flexibility when searching in case your first search term doesn’t produce any or enough results. This may sound strange since, if you are looking for information using a Web search engine, you almost always get too many results. Databases, however, contain fewer items, and having alternative search terms may lead you to useful sources. Even in a search engine like Google, having terms you can combine thoughtfully will yield better results.

The worksheet in Figure 7.3.1 [2] is an example of a process you can use to come up with search terms. It illustrates how you might think about the topic of violence in high schools. Notice that this exact phrase is not what will be used for the search. Rather, it is a starting point for identifying the terms that will eventually be used.

Example Search Term Brainstorming Worksheet

Now, use a clean copy of the same worksheet (Figure 7.3.2) [3] to think about the topic Sarah’s team is working on. How might you divide their topic into concepts and then search terms? Keep in mind that the number of concepts will depend on what you are searching for and that the search terms may be synonyms or narrower terms. Occasionally, you may be searching for something very specific, and in those cases, you may need to use broader terms as well. Jot down your ideas, then compare what you have written to the information on the second, completed worksheet (Figure 7.3.3) [4] and identify three differences.

Boolean Operators

Once you have the concepts you want to search, you need to think about how you will enter them into the search box. Often, but not always, Boolean operators will help you. You may be familiar with Boolean operators as they provide a way to link terms. There are three Boolean operators: AND , OR , and NOT . (Note: Some databases require Boolean operators to be in all caps while others will accept the terms in either upper or lower case.

We will start by capturing the ideas of the women creating the art. We will use women painters and women artists as the first step in our sample search. You could do two separate searches by typing one or the other of the terms into the search box of whatever tool you are using:

women painters women artists

You would end up with two separate results lists and have the added headache of trying to identify unique items from the lists. You could also search on the phrase:

women painters AND women artists

But once you understand Boolean operators, that last strategy won’t make as much sense as it seems to. The first Boolean operator is AND. AND is used to get the intersection of all the terms you wish to include in your search. With this example,

you are asking that the items you retrieve have both of those terms. If an item only has one term, it won’t show up in the results. This is not what the searcher had in mind—she is interested in both artists and painters because she doesn’t know which term might be used. She doesn’t intend that both terms have to be used. Let’s go on to the next Boolean operator, which will help us out with this problem.

OR is used when you want at least one of the terms to show up in the search results. If both do, that’s fine, but it isn’t a condition of the search. So OR makes a lot more sense for this search:

women painters OR women artists

Now, if you want to get fancy with this search, you could use both AND as well as OR :

women AND (painters OR artists)

The parentheses mean that these two concepts, painters and artists, should be searched as a unit, and the search results should include all items that use one word or the other. The results will then be limited to those items that contain the word women . If you decide to use parentheses for appropriate searches, make sure that the items contained within them are related in some way. With OR , as in our example, it means either of the terms will work. With AND , it means that both terms will appear in the document.

Type both of the searches above in Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) and compare the results.

• Were they the same?
• If not, can you determine what happened?
• Which results list looked better?

Here is another example of a search string using both parentheses and two Boolean operators:

entrepreneurship AND (adolescents OR teens)

In this search, you are looking for entrepreneurial initiatives connected with people in their teens. Because there are so many ways to categorize this age group, it makes sense to indicate that either of these terms should appear in the results along with entrepreneurship.

The search string above isn’t perfect. Can you pick out two problems with the search terms?

The third Boolean operator, NOT , can be problematic. NOT is used to exclude items from your search. If you have decided, based on the scope of the results you are getting, to focus only on a specific aspect of a topic, use NOT , but be aware that items are being lost in this search.

For example, if you entered

entrepreneurship AND (adolescents OR teens) NOT adults

you might lose some good results.

Why might you lose some good results using the search above?

Other Helpful Search Techniques

Using Boolean operators isn’t the only way you can create more useful searches. In this section, we will review several others.

In this search:

entrepreneurs AND (adolescents OR teens)

you might think that the items that are retrieved from the search can refer to entrepreneurs and to terms from the same root, like entrepreneurship. But because computers are very literal, they usually look for the exact terms you enter. While some search engines like Google are moving beyond this model, library databases tend to require more precision. Truncation, or searching on the root of a word and whatever follows, is how you can tell the database to do this type of search.

So, if you search on:

entrepreneur * AND (adolescents OR teens)

You will get items that refer to entrepreneur , but also entrepreneurship .

Look at these examples:

adolescen * educat *

Think of two or three words you might retrieve when searching on these roots. It is important to consider the results you might get and alter the root if need be. An example of this is polic * . Would it be a good idea to use this root if you wanted to search on policy or policies ? Why or why not?

In some cases, a symbol other than an asterisk is used. To determine what symbol to use, check the help section in whatever resource you are using. The topic should show up under the truncation or stemming headings.

Phrase Searches

Phrase searches are particularly useful when searching the web. If you put the exact phrase you want to search in quotation marks, you will only get items with those words as a phrase and not items where the words appear separately in a document, website, or other resource. Your results will usually be fewer, although surprisingly, this is not always the case.

Try these two searches in the search engine of your choice:

• “ essay exam” 

Was there a difference in the quality and quantity of results?

If you would like to find out if the database or search engine you are using allows phrase searching and the conventions for doing so, search the help section. These help tools can be very, well, helpful!

Advanced Searches

Advanced searching allows you to refine your search query and prompts you for ways to do this. Consider the basic Google search box. It is very minimalistic, but that minimalism is deceptive. It gives the impression that searching is easy and encourages you to just enter your topic without much thought to get results. You certainly do get many results, but are they really good results? Simple search boxes do many searchers a disfavor. There is a better way to enter searches.

Advanced search screens show you many of the options available to you to refine your search and, therefore, get more manageable numbers of better items. Many web search engines include advanced search screens, as do databases for searching research materials. Advanced search screens will vary from resource to resource and from web search engine to research database, but they often let you search using:

• Implied Boolean operators (for example, the “all the words” option is the same as using the Boolean AND );
• Limiters for date, domain (.edu, for example), type of resource (articles, book reviews, patents);
• Field (a field is a standard element, such as title of publication or author’s name);
• Phrase (rather than entering quote marks) Let’s see how this works in practice.

Practical Application: Google Searches

Go to the advanced search option in Google. You can find it at http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Take a look at the options Google provides to refine your search. Compare this to the basic Google search box. One of the best ways you can become a better searcher for information is to use the power of advanced searches, either by using these more complex search screens or by remembering to use Boolean operators, phrase searches, truncation, and other options available to you in most search engines and databases.

While many of the text boxes at the top of the Google Advanced Search page mirror concepts already covered in this section (for example, “this exact word or phrase” allows you to omit the quotes in a phrase search), the options for narrowing your results can be powerful. You can limit your search to a particular domain (such as .edu for items from educational institutions) or you can search for items you can reuse legally (with attribution, of course!) by making use of the “usage rights” option. However, be careful with some of the options as they may excessively limit your results. If you aren’t certain about a particular option, try your search with and without using it and compare the results. If you use a search engine other than Google, check to see if it offers an advanced search option: many do.

Subject Headings

In the section on advanced searches, you read about field searching. To explain further, if you know that the last name of the author whose work you are seeking is Wood, and that he worked on forestry-related topics, you can do a far better search using the author field. Just think what you would get in the way of results if you entered a basic search such as forestry AND wood . It is great to use the appropriate Boolean operator, but oh, the results you will get! But what if you specified that wood had to show up as part of the author’s name? This would limit your results quite a bit.

So what about forestry ? Is there a way to handle that using a field search? The answer is yes. Subject headings are terms that are assigned to items to group them. An example is cars—you could also call them autos, automobiles, or even more specific labels like SUVs or vans. You might use the Boolean operator OR and string these all together. But if you found out that the sources you are searching use automobiles as the subject heading, you wouldn’t have to worry about all these related terms, and could confidently use their subject heading and get all the results, even if the author of the piece uses cars and not automobiles .

How does this work? In many databases, a person called an indexer or cataloger scrutinizes and enters each item. This person performs helpful, behind-the-scenes tasks such as assigning subject headings, age levels, or other indicators that make it easier to search very precisely. An analogy is tagging, although indexing is more structured than tagging. If you have tagged items online, you know that you can use any terms you like and that they may be very different from someone else’s tags. With indexing, the indexer chooses from a set group of terms. Obviously, this precise indexing isn’t available for web search engines—it would be impossible to index everything on the web. But if you are searching in a database, make sure you use these features to make your searches more precise and your results lists more relevant. You also will definitely save time.

You may be thinking that this sounds good. Saving time when doing research is a great idea. But how will you know what subject headings exist so you can use them? Here is a trick that librarians use. Even librarians don’t know what terms are used in all the databases or online catalogs that they use, so a librarian’s starting point isn’t very far from yours. But they do know to use whatever features a database provides to do an effective search. They find out about them by acting like a detective.

You’ve already thought about the possible search terms for your information needs. Enter the best search strategy you developed which might use Boolean operators or truncation. Scan the results to see if they seem to be on topic. If they aren’t, figure out what results you are getting that just aren’t right and revise your search. Terms you have searched on often show up in bold face type so they are easy to pick out. Besides checking the titles of the results, read the abstracts (or summaries), if there are any. You may get some ideas for other terms to use. But if your results are fairly good, scan them with the intent to find one or two items that seem to be precisely what you need. Get to the full record (or entry), where you can see all the details entered by the indexers. Figure 7.3.4 [5]  is an example from the Texas A&M University Libraries’ Quick Search, but keep in mind that the catalog or database you are using may have entries that look very different.

Once you have the “full” record (which does not refer to the full text of the item, but rather the full descriptive details about the book, including author, subjects, date, and place of publication, and so on), look at the subject headings and see what words are used. They may be called descriptors or some other term, but they should be recognizable as subjects. They may be identical to the terms you entered but if not, revise your search using the subject heading words. The result list should now contain items that are relevant for your needs.

It is tempting to think that once you have gone through all the processes around the circle, as seen in the diagram in Figure 7.3.5 [6] , your information search is done and you can start writing. However, research is a recursive process. You don’t start at the beginning and continue straight through until you end at the end. Once you have followed this planning model, you will often find that you need to alter or refine your topic and start the process again, as seen here:

This revision process may happen at any time before or during the preparation of your paper or other final product. The researchers who are most successful do this, so don’t ignore opportunities to revise.

So let’s return to Sarah and her search for information to help her team’s project. Sarah realized she needed to make a number of changes in the search strategy she was using. She had several insights that definitely led her to some good sources of information for this particular research topic. Can you identify the good ideas she implemented?

This section contains material from:

Bernnard, Deborah, Greg Bobish, Jenna Hecker, Irina Holden, Allison Hosier, Trudi Jacobson, Tor Loney, and Daryl Bullis. The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , edited by Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson. Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014. http://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License .

• https://library.tamu.edu ↵
• “Concept Brainstorming,” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵
• “Blank Concept Brainstorming Worksheet,” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵
• “Completed Concept Brainstorming Worksheet” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵
• “Full Record Entry for a Book” is a reproduction from July 2019 of a Texas A&M University Libraries catalog entry from the Texas A&M University Libraries Quick Search. https://libcat.tamu.edu/vwebv/searchBasic. ↵
• “Planning Model” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵

A statement, usually one sentence, that summarizes an argument that will later be explained, expanded upon, and developed in a longer essay or research paper. In undergraduate writing, a thesis statement is often found in the introductory paragraph of an essay. The plural of thesis is theses .

When something is described as scholarly, that means that has been written by and for the academic community. The term scholarly is commonly used as shorthand to indicate that information that has been peer reviewed  or examined by other experts of the same academic field or discipline. Sometimes, the terms academic, scholarly, and peer reviewed are confused as synonyms; peer reviewed is a narrower term referring to an item that has been reviewed by experts in the field prior to publication, while academic is a broader term that also includes works that are written by and for academics, but that have not been peer reviewed.

A library catalog is a database of records for the items a library holds and/or to which it has access. Searching a library catalog is not the same as searching the web, even though you may see a similar search box for both tools. Library catalog searches can return information that you would not find on the open web, and the searching process will likely take longer to refine.

A librarian who specializes in helping the public find information. In academic librarians, reference librarians often have subject specialties.

A database is an organized collection of data in a digital format. Library research databases are often composed of academic publications like journal articles and book chapters, although there are also specialty databases that have data like engineering specifications or world news articles.

An online software tool used to find information on the web. Many popular online search engines return query results by using algorithms to return probable desired information.

A short account or telling of an incident or story, either personal or historical; anecdotal evidence is frequently found in the form of a personal experience rather than objective data or widespread occurrence.

Query: to ask a question or make an inquiry, often with some amount of skepticism involved.

With relation to a database, a query is a call for results. Most times a query is a search term entered into a search box.

A full record for a library item is all of the bibliographic information entered into the catalog for that particular work. Common entries in a full record will include the name of the work, the author, the publisher, the place of publication, the number of pages, the format, subject terms, and sometimes chapter titles.

A form of returning back to or reoccurrence, usually as a procedure or practice that can be repeated.

7.3 Developing a Research Strategy Copyright © 2022 by Deborah Bernnard; Greg Bobish; Jenna Hecker; Irina Holden; Allison Hosier; Trudi Jacobson; Tor Loney; Daryl Bullis; and Sarah LeMire is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Research strategy sets the general direction of research. It is one of the elements of research methodology and includes the process in which research is carried out. The right research strategy must be selected based on research objectives as well as questions, the amount of resources available and time, the philosophical foundations of the researcher, and the scope of existing knowledge about the studied area (Wedawatta G., Ingirige B., Amaratunga D. 2011, p. 3-4).

• 1 Types of research strategies
• 2 Quantitative and qualitative research strategies
• 3 Criteria to choose a research strategy
• 4 Research strategy impact on limitations of the research results
• 5 References

Types of research strategies

There are different research strategies, but they are largely convergent. Therefore, it is important to choose the most favorable strategy for a particular study. Part of the research strategies used in management and business are (Wedawatta G., Ingirige B., Amaratunga D. 2011, p. 4):

• experiment,
• action research,
• case study,
• grounded theory,
• ethnography,
• cross sectional studies.

Surveys are used to obtain data that will guide research groups (from choosing samples to questions and topics). It is a successful method that helps generate a large amount of data from many people. Respondents can be selected based on a different number of features, such as: sex, age, race, sexuality, social class or demographic questions. These questions are usually placed first in the survey. Such information may be needed by a researcher who does not know which focus groups to use (homogeneous or heterogeneous) (Hesse-Biber S., Leavy P. 2011, p. 173).

The experiment is a detailed study using the general empirical method. Processes and phenomena are tested in controlled, rigorous conditions. The main principle in each experiment is to change the selected individual component in the test procedure, the remaining components are fixed - they do not change. During a given experiment, the researcher introduces a new factor to the process, modifying its rate. This factor is called an independent variable or an experimental factor. On the other hand, factors changed under the influence of an independent variable are dependent variables (Novikov A., Novikov D. 2013, p. 56-56).

Action research

Action research is systematic research that helps people solve everyday problems, looking for effective solutions. The aim of this research is to involve complex dynamics in all social contexts. Continuous cycles of designed research seek to solve problems that occur in specific situations and locations, which allows for obtaining measures that increase efficiency and effectiveness of work , in: social organizations and agencies, human and health services, companies, schools. Thanks to this, it builds knowledge that strengthens social and professional practices and increases the well-being of people who take part in it (Stringer E. 2014, p. 1).

Case study is one of the most popular research methods used by researchers in industrial marketing . The reason for this may partly be the nature of the subject. The main object of the study are relationships and organizations that have a complex structure and are difficult to access than (for example) consumer markets. The study of a single or small number of entities brings a lot of qualitative data that can be described as a case study, providing insight into their nature of phenomena (Easton G. 2010, p. 118).

Grounded theory

Grounded theory is recognized as a qualitative research method. It aims to develop a theory that is based on the systematic collection and analysis of data. From other quantitative methods, it is distinguished by a specific approach to the development of theory. Grounded theory believes that there should be a continuous relationship between two activities: collecting and analyzing data. It allows the appearance of rich and original results, closely related to data, and offers well-marked data analysis procedures. It guarantees the researchers self-confidence, because they can indicate a large number of cases in the data that are associated with the concept produced (Urquhart C., Lehmann† H., Myers M. 2010, p. 357-358)

Ethnography

Ethnography favors nuanced, contextually rich and involved nuanced examples of qualitative social research, the driving force of the produced data are daily interactions. It includes a combination of different field techniques (interviews, observations, audiovisual recording, note taking, research of autochthonous literature) inscribed in the participants' observation. It is based on the conviction and trust that data is created thanks to the deep interaction between researchers. Ethnographers often treat data as a gift from informers with all the mutual consequences that suggest the exchange of these gifts (Falzon M. 2016, p. 1).

Cross sectional studies

Cross sectional study is one of the types of observational studies. At the same time, the researcher measures the exposure and the result of the study participants in it. Participants of the study are selected according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria adopted for a given study. After selecting the participants, the researcher assesses the exposure and results following the task. Cross-sectional studies are used to assess the incidence of diseases in clinical samples and for population studies (Setia M. 2016, p. 261)

Quantitative and qualitative research strategies

Qualitative and quantitative research strategies are two different approaches to conducting research.

Quantitative research is a method of gathering and analyzing numerical data to understand patterns and trends. This approach is often used in social sciences and natural sciences to examine cause-and-effect relationships, and it relies on statistical analysis of data. Surveys, experiments, and observational studies are some examples of quantitative research methods.

On the other hand, qualitative research is a method of gathering and analyzing non-numerical data, such as words, images, and observations. It is often used in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and it aims to understand the meaning and experiences of individuals and groups. Some examples of qualitative research methods include ethnography, case study, and grounded theory.

Both qualitative and quantitative research strategies have their own advantages and disadvantages, and the choice of which approach to use will depend on the research question and the overall goals of the study. In some cases, a mixed-methods approach, which combines both qualitative and quantitative methods, may be most appropriate.

Criteria to choose a research strategy

There are several criteria to consider when choosing a research strategy. These include:

• Relevance : The research strategy should be relevant to the research question and the purpose of the study.
• Feasibility : The research strategy should be feasible to implement within the given time and budget constraints.
• Validity : The research strategy should be able to provide valid and reliable results that can be generalized to the population of interest .
• Ethical considerations : The research strategy should take into account any ethical considerations, such as informed consent and the protection of participants' rights.
• Study design : The research strategy should be appropriate for the study design, whether it be quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods.
• Data collection methods : The research strategy should include appropriate methods for collecting and analyzing data, such as surveys, interviews, or experiments.
• The sample size : The research strategy should consider the sample size to be able to generalize the results to the population of interest.
• The resources available : The research strategy should be compatible with the resources available to the researcher, such as time, budget, and personnel.

Ultimately, the choice of research strategy will depend on the specific research question and the overall goals of the study.

Research strategy impact on limitations of the research results

The research strategy chosen can have a significant impact on the limitations of the research results. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the choice of strategy can influence the reliability and validity of the data, as well as the generalizability of the findings.

For example, quantitative research is often considered to be more objective and reliable than qualitative research because it relies on numerical data and statistical analysis. However, quantitative research can be limited by the specific research question and the methods used, and the results may not fully capture the complexity of social phenomena.

On the other hand, qualitative research can provide rich, in-depth data that can give a detailed understanding of a particular phenomenon. However, qualitative research can be more subjective and may be influenced by the researcher's own biases. Additionally, the sample size in qualitative research is usually small, which can limit the generalizability of the findings.

A mixed-methods approach can overcome some of the limitations of both qualitative and quantitative research by combining the strengths of both methods. However, it also requires more resources and can be more complex to implement.

In summary, the limitations of the research results are closely tied to the research strategy chosen. Therefore, it is important to consider the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches when choosing a research strategy and to be aware of the limitations of the research results.

• Easton G. (2010), Critical realism in case study research , Industrial Marketing Management, nr. 39, p. 118-128
• Falzon M. (2016), Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research , Taylor & Francis Group, London, p. 1
• Gravetter F., Forzano L. (2017), Research Methods for the Behavioral Sciences , Cengage Learning, USA
• Hesse-Biber S., Leavy P. (2011), The Practice of Qualitative Research , SAGE Publications, USA, p. 173
• Novikov A., Novikov D. (2013), Research Methodology: From Philosophy of Science to Research Design , CRC Press, Boca Raton, p. 56-56
• Rainer A. (2011), The longitudinal, chronological case study research strategy: A definition, and an example from IBM Hursley Park , Information and Software Technology , Volume 53, Issue 7, p. 730-746
• Setia M. (2016), Methodology Series Module 3: Cross-sectional Studies , Indian J Dermatol, nr 61, p. 261-264
• Stringer E. (2014), Action Research , SAGE Publications, USA, p. 1
• Urquhart C., Lehmann† H., Myers M. (2010), Putting the ‘theory’ back into grounded theory: guidelines for grounded theory studies in information systems , Info Systems J, nr 20, p. 357-358
• Whitley B., Kite M. , Adams H. (2013), Principles of Research in Behavioral Science , Routledge, New York
• Wedawatta G., Ingirige B., Amaratunga D. (2011), Case study as a research strategy: Investigating extreme weather resilience of construction SMEs in the UK , the University of Salford, Manchester, p. 3-4

Author: Dominika Magusiak

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6 Research strategy

A research strategy introduces the main components of a research project such as the research topic area and focus, the research perspective (see Sections 1 and 2), the research design, and the research methods (these are discussed below). It refers to how you propose to answer the research questions set and how you will implement the methodology.

In the first part of this course, you started to identify your research topic, to develop your research statement and you thought about possible research question(s). While you might already have clear research questions or objectives, it is possible that, at this stage, you are uncertain about the most appropriate strategy to implement in order to address those questions. This section looks briefly at a few research strategies you are likely to adopt.

Figure 5 shows the four main types of research strategy: case study, qualitative interviews, quantitative survey and action-oriented research. It is likely that you will use one of the first three; you are less likely to use action-oriented research.

Here is what each of these strategies entails:

• Case Study : This focuses on an in-depth investigation of a single case (e.g. one organisation) or a small number of cases. In case study research generally, information is sought from different sources and through the use of different types of data such as observations, survey, interviews and analysis of documents. Data can be qualitative, quantitative or a mix of both. Case study research allows a composite and multifaceted investigation of the issue or problem.
• Qualitative interviews : There are different types of qualitative interviews (e.g. structured, semi-structured, unstructured) and this is the most widely used method for gathering data. Interviews allow access to rich information. They require extensive planning concerning the development of the structure, decisions about who to interview and how, whether to conduct individual or group interviews, and how to record and analyse them. Interviewees need a wide range of skills, including good social skills, listening skills and communication skills. Interviews are also time-consuming to conduct and they are prone to problems and biases that need to be minimised during the design stage.
• Quantitative survey : This is a widely used method in business research and allows access to significantly high numbers of participants. The availability of online sites enables the wide and cheap distribution of surveys and the organisation of the responses. Although the development of questions may appear easy, to develop a meaningful questionnaire that allows the answering of research questions is difficult. Questionnaires need to appeal to respondents, cannot be too long, too intrusive or too difficult to understand. They also need to measure accurately the issue under investigation. For these reasons it is also advisable, when possible, to use questionnaires that are available on the market and have already been thoroughly validated. This is highly recommended for projects such as the one you need to carry out for this course. When using questionnaires decisions have to be made about the size of the sample and whether and when this is representative of the whole population studied. Surveys can be administered to the whole population (census), for example to all employees of a specific organisation.
• Action-oriented research : This refers to practical business research which is directed towards a change or the production of recommendations for change. Action-oriented research is a participatory process which brings together theory and practice, action and reflection. The project is often carried out by insiders. This is because it is grounded in the need to actively involve participants in order for them to develop ownership of the project. After the project, participants will have to implement the change.

Action-oriented research is not exactly action research, even though they are both grounded in the same assumptions (e.g. to produce change). Action research is a highly complex approach to research, reflection and change which is not always achievable in practice (Cameron and Price, 2009). Furthermore action researchers have to be highly skilled and it is unlikely that for this specific project you will be involved in action research. For these reasons this overview focuses on the less pure action-oriented research strategy. If you are interested in exploring this strategy and action research further, you might want to read Chapter 14 of Cameron and Price (2009).

It is possible for you to choose a strategy that includes the use of secondary data. Secondary data is data that has been collected by other people (e.g. employee surveys, market research data, census). Using secondary data for your research project needs to be justified in that it meets the requirements of the research questions. The use of secondary data has obvious benefits in terms of saving money and time. However, it is important to ascertain the quality of the data and how it was collected; for example, data collected by government agencies would be good quality but it may not necessary meet the needs of your project.

It is important to note that there should be consistency between the perspective (subjective or objective) and the methodology employed. This means that the type of strategy adopted needs to be coherent and that its various elements need to fit in with each other, whether the research is grounded on primary or secondary data.

Now watch this video clip in which Dr Rebecca Hewett, Prof Mark Saunders, Prof Gillian Symon and Prof David Guest discuss the importance of setting the right research question, what strategy they adopted to come up with specific research questions for their projects, and how they refined these initial research questions to focus their research.

Make notes on how you might apply some of these strategies to develop your own research question.

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Phase #2: Clearly Define Your Research Strategy

Read about the 5 Phases of an effective marketing research process here Phase 1: Research Inventory Phase 2: Clearly Define 2014 Research Strategy

A Research Strategy is a step-by-step plan of action that gives direction to your thoughts and efforts, enabling you to conduct research systematically and on schedule to produce quality results and detailed reporting. This enables one to stay focused, reduce frustration, enhance quality and most importantly, save time and resources. The Research Strategy is the nuts and bolts of your application, describing the rationale for your research and the experiments you will do to accomplish your desired goals. This post will discuss an extremely important phase in the process; clearly defining your research strategy.

In phase 1 we focused on inventory of all research, current and past. This week we will use that data to identifying specific research targets for both customer segments and feedback criteria.

This defined research strategy will also act as a reference point for benchmarking purposes so your company can see if it yielded the desired results. It requires the clear communication of targets and criteria ensuring all relevant stakeholders move in the same direction.

Identify gaps in existing data

A good place to start this process is to first examine the results of Phase 1 where you took an inventory of existing data and current research projects. With this framework you can identify gaps in data sets and create a research strategy that will compliment your company’s existing information.

Include all departments to maximize resources

Understanding the needs of your company’s individual departments, like marketing , communications , human resources and others, will help you to avoid repetitive research efforts which are both a waste of resources and damaging to communication channels with your clients. So determine data needs by department to make sure everyone is involved, to insure the highest possible value to your research investment.

Map out your customer’s life cycle

Another approach is to map out the customer’s life cycle in three steps.

• information seeking
• purchase decision
• product use

With these three steps you can visualize when you are attempting to reach your customers and evaluate whether or not the timing is appropriate for the specific information you’re trying to collect. You can also set the frequency at which you are requesting feedback or information from your customers; it is wise to avoid over-saturating a customer base with research inquiries.

What are your company’s priorities?

Once you’ve identified a need for data by examining your research inventory (established in Phase 1) and you’ve mapped out the customer life cycle to pinpoint the ideal timing for a research project, consider your company’s overall priorities to determine if a research project will help accomplish your goals. If so, then you’ve done your due diligence and moving forward with a research project is a prudent way to increase the likelihood of future success. As we’ve mentioned before, due to an ever-changing environment and variables it is impossible to predict with absolute certainty how a market will react to your product or service. However, an educated perspective of your consumer base will always improve your chances of achieving company-wide goals.

Our series will continue with – Phase #3: Conduct Research . We will discuss effective ways to communicate with your target respondents and keys to developing a successful research instrument.

Jenny Dinnen is President of Sales and Marketing at MacKenzie Corporation. Driven to maximize customer's value and exceed expectations, Jenny carries a can-do attitude wherever she goes. She maintains open communication channels with both her clients and her staff to ensure all goals and objectives are being met in an expeditious manner. Jenny is a big-picture thinker who leads MacKenzie in developing strategies for growth while maintaining a focus on the core services that have made the company a success. Basically, when something needs to get done, go see Jenny. Before joining MacKenzie, Jenny worked at HD Supply as a Marketing Manager and Household Auto Finance in their marketing department. Jenny received her undergrad degree in Marketing from the University of Colorado (Boulder) and her MBA from the University of Redlands.

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Customers that leave a brand for a competitor usually have specific reasons for doing so; whether tangible or intangible. In the case of a lost customer, it’s extremely valuable to understand WHY and WHAT (if anything) would bring that customer back. Sometimes nothing can be done and the customer is simply lost; but other times a simple adjustment can make a big difference. It might feel awkward at first, but reaching out to lost customers is actually beneficial in more than a few ways. For starters, you show customers that you care about them and that you still value their opinion. This is a strong gesture and it’s a way to passively reengage consumers who might consider returning.

Digital platforms, both social and shopping, have forever changed the consumer experience. At the same time, in-person experiences are still relevant and need to be aligned with the online experiences to provide a seamless, fluid flow between the real and digital worlds. Furthermore, consumers want personalized experiences that adjust as quickly as their preferences and favorite trends. This can be an overwhelming ordeal, or it can be as straightforward as direct and open two-way communication with your customers. This is the power of an ongoing Voice of Customer satisfaction program. By understand what your customers want, listening to how they feel your brand is performing, and being open to improvement suggestions, you will have all the data-driven insights you need win customer loyalty.

In addition to marketing reach and visibility, it’s important to consider the impact of specific brand messages. If the goal is to shape or reinforce brand image, customer feedback is the only way to measure marketing effectiveness. If the goal is to motivate action, such as visiting a website or purchasing a particular item, then sales tracking is one way to measure marketing effectiveness. However, transaction data doesn’t address purchase decision drivers so it’s difficult to attribute a sale to a particular marketing campaign. Again, direct customer feedback is required to identify their decision drivers.

For up-and-coming brands, or even established brands looking to expand their products/services, it’s important to answer the question, “Are consumers aware of our brand?” This is the first step in developing a strong, long-term marketing strategy and will provide a reliable benchmark for future reference. By segmenting awareness and perception data, you’ll have a clear indication of your current standing within specific markets and customer demographics.

It’s easy to become narrow-sighted and overly focused on one objective to the point where surrounding activity is unnoticed; especially with the rapid progression of technology and emerging consumer trends. The most successful brands will occasionally take a step back for a high-level, impartial look at the overall market landscape for a refreshed perspective on how their business fits into the bigger picture. Detailed Market Mapping not only acts as a preventative measure by exposing threats and potential danger, it will also uncover secondary variables that may be flying under the radar. This dual-benefit will swing the competitive balance in your favor by equipping your organization with the insights needed to make confident decisions; both short-term and long-term.

There’s no way to predict the future with absolute certainty but there are ways of applying market insights to improve success probabilities. Rather than conducting a series of trial-and-error initiatives, conducting research prior to forward-thinking strategic development will support informed decision making today and establish benchmarks for comparative analysis in the future. Just like having a map on a road trip, Market Mapping defines the surrounding area so decision makers can see where they’re going, stay on track and safely reach their destination. A clearly illustrated framework of your competitive environment enables your team to run through possible scenarios and how the market might react under specific circumstances.

Consumers are complex and unique individuals whose purchase decisions are influenced by a broader spectrum of attributes than the traditional price, product, placement, and positioning. Of course these are still relevant, but modern consumers are looking for more. Factors that may not seem to align at first glance are now connected (i.e. Health Concerns and Retail). The Market Mapping process will not only uncover the pieces it will act as a guide to reveal how the pieces fit together. Brands that understand their surroundings and create action plans based on market insights are best equipped to take proactive rather than reactive measures.

Understanding the past is a great place to start when strategically planning for the future. Consider market conditions and consumer preferences as they exist today, then examine the historical timeline of economic, social, political and technological shifts that have impacted your industry. By highlighting the environmental factors that have shaped consumer behavior, your brand will be equipped with consumer insights explaining the why, how and when of significant market shifts.

Imagine each existing dataset is a brick. If the bricks are haphazardly tossed in a pile then standing on that pile won’t be easy, But if the bricks are organized and positioned in a way that they work together, then there’s a foundation to not only stand on but to build on. Treat your existing data inventory as building materials rather than the byproducts of past efforts. No matter when or why data was collected, it still holds considerable value. After completing the Data Inventory Assessment, ensuing efforts will continue building on a solid foundation rather than merely adding more bricks to the pile.

Every company has its missing puzzle pieces, but not every company is willing to do something about it. Actively searching to identify the gaps in what you know about your customers and your market is an important part of strategic brand development. There’s also the benefit of ensuring that any steps taken are covering new ground rather than repeating what’s already been done. Pursuing the missing pieces will build upon the bigger picture and add cohesive value, but the only way to pursue the missing pieces is by knowing with certainty which pieces are missing.

By organizing and analyzing the existing customer data, brands will gain a clear picture what is quantifiably known at that point in time. This process will also itemize the types of data being held and it will establish benchmarks for future comparative analytics. Identifying the metrics that are most beneficial to current goals and objectives will produce the actionable insights needed to guide decision making.

Market research and data analytics are commonly applied on a “need-to-know” basis; meaning individual projects or initiatives are launched to address a specific set of questions for short-term application. After serving their intended purpose, these data files usually go into the vault and are rarely (if ever) seen again. But our Data Inventory Assessment digs into this data vault and offers a second life to the dormant files within.

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Methodology

Research Methods | Definitions, Types, Examples

Research methods are specific procedures for collecting and analyzing data. Developing your research methods is an integral part of your research design . When planning your methods, there are two key decisions you will make.

First, decide how you will collect data . Your methods depend on what type of data you need to answer your research question :

• Qualitative vs. quantitative : Will your data take the form of words or numbers?
• Primary vs. secondary : Will you collect original data yourself, or will you use data that has already been collected by someone else?
• Descriptive vs. experimental : Will you take measurements of something as it is, or will you perform an experiment?

Second, decide how you will analyze the data .

• For quantitative data, you can use statistical analysis methods to test relationships between variables.
• For qualitative data, you can use methods such as thematic analysis to interpret patterns and meanings in the data.

Table of contents

Methods for collecting data, examples of data collection methods, methods for analyzing data, examples of data analysis methods, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about research methods.

Data is the information that you collect for the purposes of answering your research question . The type of data you need depends on the aims of your research.

Qualitative vs. quantitative data

Your choice of qualitative or quantitative data collection depends on the type of knowledge you want to develop.

For questions about ideas, experiences and meanings, or to study something that can’t be described numerically, collect qualitative data .

If you want to develop a more mechanistic understanding of a topic, or your research involves hypothesis testing , collect quantitative data .

You can also take a mixed methods approach , where you use both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Primary vs. secondary research

Primary research is any original data that you collect yourself for the purposes of answering your research question (e.g. through surveys , observations and experiments ). Secondary research is data that has already been collected by other researchers (e.g. in a government census or previous scientific studies).

If you are exploring a novel research question, you’ll probably need to collect primary data . But if you want to synthesize existing knowledge, analyze historical trends, or identify patterns on a large scale, secondary data might be a better choice.

Descriptive vs. experimental data

In descriptive research , you collect data about your study subject without intervening. The validity of your research will depend on your sampling method .

In experimental research , you systematically intervene in a process and measure the outcome. The validity of your research will depend on your experimental design .

To conduct an experiment, you need to be able to vary your independent variable , precisely measure your dependent variable, and control for confounding variables . If it’s practically and ethically possible, this method is the best choice for answering questions about cause and effect.

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Your data analysis methods will depend on the type of data you collect and how you prepare it for analysis.

Data can often be analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, survey responses could be analyzed qualitatively by studying the meanings of responses or quantitatively by studying the frequencies of responses.

Qualitative analysis methods

Qualitative analysis is used to understand words, ideas, and experiences. You can use it to interpret data that was collected:

• From open-ended surveys and interviews , literature reviews , case studies , ethnographies , and other sources that use text rather than numbers.
• Using non-probability sampling methods .

Qualitative analysis tends to be quite flexible and relies on the researcher’s judgement, so you have to reflect carefully on your choices and assumptions and be careful to avoid research bias .

Quantitative analysis methods

Quantitative analysis uses numbers and statistics to understand frequencies, averages and correlations (in descriptive studies) or cause-and-effect relationships (in experiments).

You can use quantitative analysis to interpret data that was collected either:

• During an experiment .
• Using probability sampling methods .

Because the data is collected and analyzed in a statistically valid way, the results of quantitative analysis can be easily standardized and shared among researchers.

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If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Chi square test of independence
• Statistical power
• Descriptive statistics
• Degrees of freedom
• Pearson correlation
• Null hypothesis
• Double-blind study
• Case-control study
• Research ethics
• Data collection
• Hypothesis testing
• Structured interviews

Research bias

• Hawthorne effect
• Unconscious bias
• Recall bias
• Halo effect
• Self-serving bias
• Information bias

Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings.

Quantitative methods allow you to systematically measure variables and test hypotheses . Qualitative methods allow you to explore concepts and experiences in more detail.

In mixed methods research , you use both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods to answer your research question .

A sample is a subset of individuals from a larger population . Sampling means selecting the group that you will actually collect data from in your research. For example, if you are researching the opinions of students in your university, you could survey a sample of 100 students.

In statistics, sampling allows you to test a hypothesis about the characteristics of a population.

The research methods you use depend on the type of data you need to answer your research question .

• If you want to measure something or test a hypothesis , use quantitative methods . If you want to explore ideas, thoughts and meanings, use qualitative methods .
• If you want to analyze a large amount of readily-available data, use secondary data. If you want data specific to your purposes with control over how it is generated, collect primary data.
• If you want to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables , use experimental methods. If you want to understand the characteristics of a research subject, use descriptive methods.

Methodology refers to the overarching strategy and rationale of your research project . It involves studying the methods used in your field and the theories or principles behind them, in order to develop an approach that matches your objectives.

Methods are the specific tools and procedures you use to collect and analyze data (for example, experiments, surveys , and statistical tests ).

In shorter scientific papers, where the aim is to report the findings of a specific study, you might simply describe what you did in a methods section .

In a longer or more complex research project, such as a thesis or dissertation , you will probably include a methodology section , where you explain your approach to answering the research questions and cite relevant sources to support your choice of methods.

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How to formulate a research strategy?

A research strategy refers to a step-by-step plan of action that gives direction to the researcher’s thought process. It enables a researcher to conduct the research systematically and on schedule. The main purpose is to introduce the principal components of the study such as the research topic, areas, major focus, research design and finally the research methods.

An appropriate strategy has to be selected on the basis of the following:

• Research questions.
• Research objectives.
• Amount of time available.
• Resources at the researcher’s disposal.
• Philosophical underpinnings of the researcher.

Types of research strategies

Research strategy helps a researcher choose the right data collection and analysis procedure. Thus, it is of utmost importance to choose the right strategy while conducting the research. The following section will focus on the different types of strategies that can be used.

• Qualitative: This strategy is generally used when to understand the underlying reasons or the opinion of the people on certain facts or a problem. It does not involve numerical data. It provides insights into the research problem and hence helps in achieving the research objectives. Various methods that can be used include interviews, observations, open-ended surveys and focus group discussions.
• Quantitative: It involves the collection of primary or secondary data which is in numerical form. Under this strategy, the researcher can collect the data by using questionnaires, polls and surveys or through secondary sources. This strategy mainly focuses on when, where, what and how often a specific phenomenon occurs.
• Descriptive: This is generally used when the researcher wants to describe a particular situation. This involves observing and describing the behaviour patterns of either an individual, community or any group. One thing that distinguishes it from other forms of research strategies is that subjects are observed in a completely unchanged environment. Under this approach surveys, observations and case studies are mainly used to collect the data and to understand the specific set of variables.
• Analytical: This involves the use of already available information. Here the researcher in an attempt to understand the complex problem set, studies and analyses the available data. It majorly concerns the cause-and-effect relationship. The scientifically based problem-solving approaches mainly use this strategy.
• Action: This strategy aims at finding solutions to an immediate problem. It is generally applied by an agency, company or by government in order to address a particular problem and find possible solutions to it. For example, finding which strategy could best work out to motivate physically challenged students.
• Basic: According to this strategy no generalizations are made in order to understand the subject in a better and more precise way. Thus, it involves investigation and the analysis of a phenomenon. Although their findings are not directly applicable in the real world, they work towards enhancing the knowledge base.  
• Critical: It works towards analyzing the claims regarding a particular society. For example, a researcher can focus on any conclusion or theory made regarding a particular society or culture and test it empirically through a survey or experiment.  
• Interpretive: this strategy is similar to the qualitative research strategy. However, rather than using hypothesis testing, interpretation is done through the sense-making process. In simple terms, this strategy uses human experience in order to understand the phenomena.
• Exploratory: It is mainly used to gain insights into the problem or regarding certain situations but does work towards providing the solution to the research problem. This research strategy is generally undertaken when there is very little or no earlier study on the research topic.
• Predictive: It deals with developing an understanding of the future of the research problem and has its foundation based on probability. This is generally very popular among companies and organizations.

Difference between the types of research strategy

How to write a research strategy.

The main components of a research strategy include the research paradigm, research design, research method and sampling strategy. It should be in a form such that your research paradigm should guide your research design. Which in turn should lead to the appropriate selection of the research methods along with the correct sampling strategy. It is applicable to different kinds of research such as exploratory, explanatory and descriptive.

Step1: Defining the research paradigm

This involves a basic set of beliefs that guides the researcher regarding the way of performing the research. There are various types of research paradigms, including positivism, post-positivism or constructivism.

Step 2: Defining the research design

The research paradigm and the type of research mainly guide the choice of research design. For example, some researches that include experiments lean quantitative research design. On the other hand, exploratory research in social sciences often uses a qualitative research design. This must be done very carefully because the research design will eventually impact the choice of research method and sampling strategy.

Step 3: Defining research methods

This step helps the researcher to explain the potential methods that can be used for carrying out the research. The choice here also depends on the research paradigm and research design selected in the above steps. For example, if a researcher followed a constructivist paradigm using a qualitative research design, then the data collection method can be interviews, observation or focus group discussions.

Step 4: Defining the sampling strategy

This step involves specifying the population, sample size and sampling type for a study. In the population, the researcher defines the profile of respondents and justifies their suitability for the study. For defining the sample size , a specific formula can be applied.  Finally, there are many sampling types for a researcher to choose from.

Things to keep in mind while writing research strategies

As there exist different types of research strategies, for the researcher, order to embark according to the study needs he or must identify the three main questions in order to write an appropriate strategy.

Is it suitable for the research aim?

As shown in the figure above the first thing that needs to be kept in mind is that the strategy should be suitable with respect to the purpose of the study i.e. it should rather support the researcher in finding the answers to the research questions which are under the consideration.

For example, a case study may be considered the right choice when investigating the social relationship in some specific setting, while it might be probably inappropriate when it comes to measuring the attitude of a large population.

Feasibility as per available sources

The second point that needs to be considered, is that it should be feasible from the practical point of view. The researcher should formulate the strategy so that he or she had complete access to data sources. Also, some of the research strategies like action research which are generally highly time-consuming, thus the researcher must consider all these aspects while preparing the strategy.

Ethical considerations

Also, another point that needs to be considered, is that the researcher should ensure that the strategy chosen must be followed in a responsible way. For example, in social science research participants of the study should be allowed to remain anonymous.

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What Is Research Methodology? A Plain-Language Explanation & Definition (With Examples)

By Derek Jansen (MBA)  and Kerryn Warren (PhD) | June 2020 (Last updated April 2023)

If you’re new to formal academic research, it’s quite likely that you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by all the technical lingo that gets thrown around. And who could blame you – “research methodology”, “research methods”, “sampling strategies”… it all seems never-ending!

In this post, we’ll demystify the landscape with plain-language explanations and loads of examples (including easy-to-follow videos), so that you can approach your dissertation, thesis or research project with confidence. Let’s get started.

Research Methodology 101

• What exactly research methodology means
• What qualitative , quantitative and mixed methods are
• What sampling strategy is
• What data collection methods are
• What data analysis methods are
• How to choose your research methodology
• Example of a research methodology

What is research methodology?

Research methodology simply refers to the practical “how” of a research study. More specifically, it’s about how  a researcher  systematically designs a study  to ensure valid and reliable results that address the research aims, objectives and research questions . Specifically, how the researcher went about deciding:

• What type of data to collect (e.g., qualitative or quantitative data )
• Who  to collect it from (i.e., the sampling strategy )
• How to  collect  it (i.e., the data collection method )
• How to  analyse  it (i.e., the data analysis methods )

Within any formal piece of academic research (be it a dissertation, thesis or journal article), you’ll find a research methodology chapter or section which covers the aspects mentioned above. Importantly, a good methodology chapter explains not just   what methodological choices were made, but also explains  why they were made. In other words, the methodology chapter should justify  the design choices, by showing that the chosen methods and techniques are the best fit for the research aims, objectives and research questions. 

So, it’s the same as research design?

Not quite. As we mentioned, research methodology refers to the collection of practical decisions regarding what data you’ll collect, from who, how you’ll collect it and how you’ll analyse it. Research design, on the other hand, is more about the overall strategy you’ll adopt in your study. For example, whether you’ll use an experimental design in which you manipulate one variable while controlling others. You can learn more about research design and the various design types here .

Need a helping hand?

What are qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods?

Qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods are different types of methodological approaches, distinguished by their focus on words , numbers or both . This is a bit of an oversimplification, but its a good starting point for understanding.

Let’s take a closer look.

Qualitative research refers to research which focuses on collecting and analysing words (written or spoken) and textual or visual data, whereas quantitative research focuses on measurement and testing using numerical data . Qualitative analysis can also focus on other “softer” data points, such as body language or visual elements.

It’s quite common for a qualitative methodology to be used when the research aims and research questions are exploratory  in nature. For example, a qualitative methodology might be used to understand peoples’ perceptions about an event that took place, or a political candidate running for president. 

Contrasted to this, a quantitative methodology is typically used when the research aims and research questions are confirmatory  in nature. For example, a quantitative methodology might be used to measure the relationship between two variables (e.g. personality type and likelihood to commit a crime) or to test a set of hypotheses .

As you’ve probably guessed, the mixed-method methodology attempts to combine the best of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to integrate perspectives and create a rich picture. If you’d like to learn more about these three methodological approaches, be sure to watch our explainer video below.

What is sampling strategy?

Simply put, sampling is about deciding who (or where) you’re going to collect your data from . Why does this matter? Well, generally it’s not possible to collect data from every single person in your group of interest (this is called the “population”), so you’ll need to engage a smaller portion of that group that’s accessible and manageable (this is called the “sample”).

How you go about selecting the sample (i.e., your sampling strategy) will have a major impact on your study.  There are many different sampling methods  you can choose from, but the two overarching categories are probability   sampling and  non-probability   sampling .

Probability sampling  involves using a completely random sample from the group of people you’re interested in. This is comparable to throwing the names all potential participants into a hat, shaking it up, and picking out the “winners”. By using a completely random sample, you’ll minimise the risk of selection bias and the results of your study will be more generalisable  to the entire population. 

Non-probability sampling , on the other hand,  doesn’t use a random sample . For example, it might involve using a convenience sample, which means you’d only interview or survey people that you have access to (perhaps your friends, family or work colleagues), rather than a truly random sample. With non-probability sampling, the results are typically not generalisable .

To learn more about sampling methods, be sure to check out the video below.

What are data collection methods?

As the name suggests, data collection methods simply refers to the way in which you go about collecting the data for your study. Some of the most common data collection methods include:

• Interviews (which can be unstructured, semi-structured or structured)
• Focus groups and group interviews
• Surveys (online or physical surveys)
• Observations (watching and recording activities)
• Biophysical measurements (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, etc.)
• Documents and records (e.g., financial reports, court records, etc.)

The choice of which data collection method to use depends on your overall research aims and research questions , as well as practicalities and resource constraints. For example, if your research is exploratory in nature, qualitative methods such as interviews and focus groups would likely be a good fit. Conversely, if your research aims to measure specific variables or test hypotheses, large-scale surveys that produce large volumes of numerical data would likely be a better fit.

What are data analysis methods?

Data analysis methods refer to the methods and techniques that you’ll use to make sense of your data. These can be grouped according to whether the research is qualitative  (words-based) or quantitative (numbers-based).

Popular data analysis methods in qualitative research include:

• Qualitative content analysis
• Thematic analysis
• Discourse analysis
• Narrative analysis
• Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA)
• Visual analysis (of photographs, videos, art, etc.)

Qualitative data analysis all begins with data coding , after which an analysis method is applied. In some cases, more than one analysis method is used, depending on the research aims and research questions . In the video below, we explore some  common qualitative analysis methods, along with practical examples.  

Moving on to the quantitative side of things, popular data analysis methods in this type of research include:

• Descriptive statistics (e.g. means, medians, modes )
• Inferential statistics (e.g. correlation, regression, structural equation modelling)

Again, the choice of which data collection method to use depends on your overall research aims and objectives , as well as practicalities and resource constraints. In the video below, we explain some core concepts central to quantitative analysis.

How do I choose a research methodology?

As you’ve probably picked up by now, your research aims and objectives have a major influence on the research methodology . So, the starting point for developing your research methodology is to take a step back and look at the big picture of your research, before you make methodology decisions. The first question you need to ask yourself is whether your research is exploratory or confirmatory in nature.

If your research aims and objectives are primarily exploratory in nature, your research will likely be qualitative and therefore you might consider qualitative data collection methods (e.g. interviews) and analysis methods (e.g. qualitative content analysis). 

Conversely, if your research aims and objective are looking to measure or test something (i.e. they’re confirmatory), then your research will quite likely be quantitative in nature, and you might consider quantitative data collection methods (e.g. surveys) and analyses (e.g. statistical analysis).

Designing your research and working out your methodology is a large topic, which we cover extensively on the blog . For now, however, the key takeaway is that you should always start with your research aims, objectives and research questions (the golden thread). Every methodological choice you make needs align with those three components. 

Example of a research methodology chapter

In the video below, we provide a detailed walkthrough of a research methodology from an actual dissertation, as well as an overview of our free methodology template .

Psst… there’s more (for free)

This post is part of our dissertation mini-course, which covers everything you need to get started with your dissertation, thesis or research project. 

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199 Comments

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I am writing a APA Format paper . I using questionnaire with 120 STDs teacher for my participant. Can you write me mthology for this research. Send it through email sent. Just need a sample as an example please. My topic is ” impacts of overcrowding on students learning

Thanks for your comment.

We can’t write your methodology for you. If you’re looking for samples, you should be able to find some sample methodologies on Google. Alternatively, you can download some previous dissertations from a dissertation directory and have a look at the methodology chapters therein.

All the best with your research.

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how do i reference this?

MLA Jansen, Derek, and Kerryn Warren. “What (Exactly) Is Research Methodology?” Grad Coach, June 2021, gradcoach.com/what-is-research-methodology/.

APA Jansen, D., & Warren, K. (2021, June). What (Exactly) Is Research Methodology? Grad Coach. https://gradcoach.com/what-is-research-methodology/

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• v.106(4); 2018 Oct

A systematic approach to searching: an efficient and complete method to develop literature searches

Associated data.

Creating search strategies for systematic reviews, finding the best balance between sensitivity and specificity, and translating search strategies between databases is challenging. Several methods describe standards for systematic search strategies, but a consistent approach for creating an exhaustive search strategy has not yet been fully described in enough detail to be fully replicable. The authors have established a method that describes step by step the process of developing a systematic search strategy as needed in the systematic review. This method describes how single-line search strategies can be prepared in a text document by typing search syntax (such as field codes, parentheses, and Boolean operators) before copying and pasting search terms (keywords and free-text synonyms) that are found in the thesaurus. To help ensure term completeness, we developed a novel optimization technique that is mainly based on comparing the results retrieved by thesaurus terms with those retrieved by the free-text search words to identify potentially relevant candidate search terms. Macros in Microsoft Word have been developed to convert syntaxes between databases and interfaces almost automatically. This method helps information specialists in developing librarian-mediated searches for systematic reviews as well as medical and health care practitioners who are searching for evidence to answer clinical questions. The described method can be used to create complex and comprehensive search strategies for different databases and interfaces, such as those that are needed when searching for relevant references for systematic reviews, and will assist both information specialists and practitioners when they are searching the biomedical literature.

INTRODUCTION

Librarians and information specialists are often involved in the process of preparing and completing systematic reviews (SRs), where one of their main tasks is to identify relevant references to include in the review [ 1 ]. Although several recommendations for the process of searching have been published [ 2 – 6 ], none describe the development of a systematic search strategy from start to finish.

Traditional methods of SR search strategy development and execution are highly time consuming, reportedly requiring up to 100 hours or more [ 7 , 8 ]. The authors wanted to develop systematic and exhaustive search strategies more efficiently, while preserving the high sensitivity that SR search strategies necessitate. In this article, we describe the method developed at Erasmus University Medical Center (MC) and demonstrate its use through an example search. The efficiency of the search method and outcome of 73 searches that have resulted in published reviews are described in a separate article [ 9 ].

As we aimed to describe the creation of systematic searches in full detail, the method starts at a basic level with the analysis of the research question and the creation of search terms. Readers who are new to SR searching are advised to follow all steps described. More experienced searchers can consider the basic steps to be existing knowledge that will already be part of their normal workflow, although step 4 probably differs from general practice. Experienced searchers will gain the most from reading about the novelties in the method as described in steps 10–13 and comparing the examples given in the supplementary appendix to their own practice.

CREATING A SYSTEMATIC SEARCH STRATEGY

Our methodology for planning and creating a multi-database search strategy consists of the following steps:

• Determine a clear and focused question
• Describe the articles that can answer the question
• Decide which key concepts address the different elements of the question
• Decide which elements should be used for the best results
• Choose an appropriate database and interface to start with
• Document the search process in a text document
• Identify appropriate index terms in the thesaurus of the first database
• Identify synonyms in the thesaurus
• Add variations in search terms
• Use database-appropriate syntax, with parentheses, Boolean operators, and field codes
• Optimize the search
• Evaluate the initial results
• Check for errors
• Translate to other databases
• Test and reiterate

Each step in the process is reflected by an example search described in the supplementary appendix .

1. Determine a clear and focused question

A systematic search can best be applied to a well-defined and precise research or clinical question. Questions that are too broad or too vague cannot be answered easily in a systematic way and will generally result in an overwhelming number of search results. On the other hand, a question that is too specific will result into too few or even zero search results. Various papers describe this process in more detail [ 10 – 12 ].

2. Describe the articles that can answer the question

Although not all clinical or research questions can be answered in the literature, the next step is to presume that the answer can indeed be found in published studies. A good starting point for a search is hypothesizing what the research that can answer the question would look like. These hypothetical (when possible, combined with known) articles can be used as guidance for constructing the search strategy.

3. Decide which key concepts address the different elements of the question

Key concepts are the topics or components that the desired articles should address, such as diseases or conditions, actions, substances, settings, domains (e.g., therapy, diagnosis, etiology), or study types. Key concepts from the research question can be grouped to create elements in the search strategy.

Elements in a search strategy do not necessarily follow the patient, intervention, comparison, outcome (PICO) structure or any other related structure. Using the PICO or another similar framework as guidance can be helpful to consider, especially in the inclusion and exclusion review stage of the SR, but this is not necessary for good search strategy development [ 13 – 15 ]. Sometimes concepts from different parts of the PICO structure can be grouped together into one search element, such as when the desired outcome is frequently described in a certain study type.

4. Decide which elements should be used for the best results

Not all elements of a research question should necessarily be used in the search strategy. Some elements are less important than others or may unnecessarily complicate or restrict a search strategy. Adding an element to a search strategy increases the chance of missing relevant references. Therefore, the number of elements in a search strategy should remain as low as possible to optimize recall.

Using the schema in Figure 1 , elements can be ordered by their specificity and importance to determine the best search approach. Whether an element is more specific or more general can be measured objectively by the number of hits retrieved in a database when searching for a key term representing that element. Depending on the research question, certain elements are more important than others. If articles (hypothetically or known) exist that can answer the question but lack a certain element in their titles, abstracts, or keywords, that element is unimportant to the question. An element can also be unimportant because of expected bias or an overlap with another element.

Schema for determining the optimal order of elements

Bias in elements

The choice of elements in a search strategy can introduce bias through use of overly specific terminology or terms often associated with positive outcomes. For the question “does prolonged breastfeeding improve intelligence outcomes in children?,” searching specifically for the element of duration will introduce bias, as articles that find a positive effect of prolonged breastfeeding will be much more likely to mention time factors in their titles or abstracts.

Overlapping elements

Elements in a question sometimes overlap in their meaning. Sometimes certain therapies are interventions for one specific disease. The Lichtenstein technique, for example, is a repair method for inguinal hernias. There is no need to include an element of “inguinal hernias” to a search for the effectiveness of the Lichtenstein therapy. Likewise, sometimes certain diseases are only found in certain populations. Adding such an overlapping element could lead to missing relevant references.

The elements to use in a search strategy can be found in the plot of elements in Figure 1 , by following the top row from left to right. For this method, we recommend starting with the most important and specific elements. Then, continue with more general and important elements until the number of results is acceptable for screening. Determining how many results are acceptable for screening is often a matter of negotiation with the SR team.

5. Choose an appropriate database and interface to start with

Important factors for choosing databases to use are the coverage and the presence of a thesaurus. For medically oriented searches, the coverage and recall of Embase, which includes the MEDLINE database, are superior to those of MEDLINE [ 16 ]. Each of these two databases has its own thesaurus with its own unique definitions and structure. Because of the complexity of the Embase thesaurus, Emtree, which contains much more specific thesaurus terms than the MEDLINE Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus, translation from Emtree to MeSH is easier than the other way around. Therefore, we recommend starting in Embase.

MEDLINE and Embase are available through many different vendors and interfaces. The choice of an interface and primary database is often determined by the searcher’s accessibility. For our method, an interface that allows searching with proximity operators is desirable, and full functionality of the thesaurus, including explosion of narrower terms, is crucial. We recommend developing a personal workflow that always starts with one specific database and interface.

6. Document the search process in a text document

We advise designing and creating the complete search strategies in a log document, instead of directly in the database itself, to register the steps taken and to make searches accountable and reproducible. The developed search strategies can be copied and pasted into the desired databases from the log document. This way, the searcher is in control of the whole process. Any change to the search strategy should be done in the log document, assuring that the search strategy in the log is always the most recent.

7. Identify appropriate index terms in the thesaurus of the first database

Searches should start by identifying appropriate thesaurus terms for the desired elements. The thesaurus of the database is searched for matching index terms for each key concept. We advise restricting the initial terms to the most important and most relevant terms. Later in the process, more general terms can be added in the optimization process, in which the effect on the number of hits, and thus the desirability of adding these terms, can be evaluated more easily.

Several factors can complicate the identification of thesaurus terms. Sometimes, one thesaurus term is found that exactly describes a specific element. In contrast, especially in more general elements, multiple thesaurus terms can be found to describe one element. If no relevant thesaurus terms have been found for an element, free-text terms can be used, and possible thesaurus terms found in the resulting references can be added later (step 11).

Sometimes, no distinct thesaurus term is available for a specific key concept that describes the concept in enough detail. In Emtree, one thesaurus term often combines two or more elements. The easiest solution for combining these terms for a sensitive search is to use such a thesaurus term in all elements where it is relevant. Examples are given in the supplementary appendix .

8. Identify synonyms in the thesaurus

Most thesauri offer a list of synonyms on their term details page (named Synonyms in Emtree and Entry Terms in MeSH). To create a sensitive search strategy for SRs, these terms need to be searched as free-text keywords in the title and abstract fields, in addition to searching their associated thesaurus terms.

The Emtree thesaurus contains more synonyms (300,000) than MeSH does (220,000) [ 17 ]. The difference in number of terms is even higher considering that many synonyms in MeSH are permuted terms (i.e., inversions of phrases using commas).

Thesaurus terms are ordered in a tree structure. When searching for a more general thesaurus term, the more specific (narrower) terms in the branches below that term will also be searched (this is frequently referred to as “exploding” a thesaurus term). However, to perform a sensitive search, all relevant variations of the narrower terms must be searched as free-text keywords in the title or abstract, in addition to relying on the exploded thesaurus term. Thus, all articles that describe a certain narrower topic in their titles and abstracts will already be retrieved before MeSH terms are added.

9. Add variations in search terms (e.g., truncation, spelling differences, abbreviations, opposites)

Truncation allows a searcher to search for words beginning with the same word stem. A search for therap* will, thus, retrieve therapy, therapies, therapeutic, and all other words starting with “therap.” Do not truncate a word stem that is too short. Also, limitations of interfaces should be taken into account, especially in PubMed, where the number of search term variations that can be found by truncation is limited to 600.

Databases contain references to articles using both standard British and American English spellings. Both need to be searched as free-text terms in the title and abstract. Alternatively, many interfaces offer a certain code to replace zero or one characters, allowing a search for “pediatric” or “paediatric” as “p?ediatric.” Table 1 provides a detailed description of the syntax for different interfaces.

Field codes in five most used interfaces for biomedical literature searching

Searching for abbreviations can identify extra, relevant references and retrieve more irrelevant ones. The search can be more focused by combining the abbreviation with an important word that is relevant to its meaning or by using the Boolean “NOT” to exclude frequently observed, clearly irrelevant results. We advise that searchers do not exclude all possible irrelevant meanings, as it is very time consuming to identify all the variations, it will result in unnecessarily complicated search strategies, and it may lead to erroneously narrowing the search and, thereby, reduce recall.

Searching partial abbreviations can be useful for retrieving relevant references. For example, it is very likely that an article would mention osteoarthritis (OA) early in the abstract, replacing all further occurrences of osteoarthritis with OA . Therefore, it may not contain the phrase “hip osteoarthritis” but only “hip oa.”

It is also important to search for the opposites of search terms to avoid bias. When searching for “disease recurrence,” articles about “disease free” may be relevant as well. When the desired outcome is survival , articles about mortality may be relevant.

10. Use database-appropriate syntax, with parentheses, Boolean operators, and field codes

Different interfaces require different syntaxes, the special set of rules and symbols unique to each database that define how a correctly constructed search operates. Common syntax components include the use of parentheses and Boolean operators such as “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT,” which are available in all major interfaces. An overview of different syntaxes for four major interfaces for bibliographic medical databases (PubMed, Ovid, EBSCOhost, Embase.com, and ProQuest) is shown in Table 1 .

Creating the appropriate syntax for each database, in combination with the selected terms as described in steps 7–9, can be challenging. Following the method outlined below simplifies the process:

• Create single-line queries in a text document (not combining multiple record sets), which allows immediate checking of the relevance of retrieved references and efficient optimization.
• Type the syntax (Boolean operators, parentheses, and field codes) before adding terms, which reduces the chance that errors are made in the syntax, especially in the number of parentheses.
• Use predefined proximity structures including parentheses, such as (() ADJ3 ()) in Ovid, that can be reused in the query when necessary.
• Use thesaurus terms separately from free-text terms of each element. Start an element with all thesaurus terms (using “OR”) and follow with the free-text terms. This allows the unique optimization methods as described in step 11.
• When adding terms to an existing search strategy, pay close attention to the position of the cursor. Make sure to place it appropriately either in the thesaurus terms section, in the title/abstract section, or as an addition (broadening) to an existing proximity search.

The supplementary appendix explains the method of building a query in more detail, step by step for different interfaces: PubMed, Ovid, EBSCOhost, Embase.com, and ProQuest. This method results in a basic search strategy designed to retrieve some relevant references upon which a more thorough search strategy can be built with optimization such as described in step 11.

11. Optimize the search

The most important question when performing a systematic search is whether all (or most) potentially relevant articles have been retrieved by the search strategy. This is also the most difficult question to answer, since it is unknown which and how many articles are relevant. It is, therefore, wise first to broaden the initial search strategy, making the search more sensitive, and then check if new relevant articles are found by comparing the set results (i.e., search for Strategy #2 NOT Strategy #1 to see the unique results).

A search strategy should be tested for completeness. Therefore, it is necessary to identify extra, possibly relevant search terms and add them to the test search in an OR relationship with the already used search terms. A good place to start, and a well-known strategy, is scanning the top retrieved articles when sorted by relevance, looking for additional relevant synonyms that could be added to the search strategy.

We have developed a unique optimization method that has not been described before in the literature. This method often adds valuable extra terms to our search strategy and, therefore, extra, relevant references to our search results. Extra synonyms can be found in articles that have been assigned a certain set of thesaurus terms but that lack synonyms in the title and/or abstract that are already present in the current search strategy. Searching for thesaurus terms NOT free-text terms will help identify missed free-text terms in the title or abstract. Searching for free-text terms NOT thesaurus terms will help identify missed thesaurus terms. If this is done repeatedly for each element, leaving the rest of the query unchanged, this method will help add numerous relevant terms to the query. These steps are explained in detail for five different search platforms in the supplementary appendix .

12. Evaluate the initial results

The results should now contain relevant references. If the interface allows relevance ranking, use that in the evaluation. If you know some relevant references that should be included in the research, search for those references specifically; for example, combine a specific (first) author name with a page number and the publication year. Check whether those references are retrieved by the search. If the known relevant references are not retrieved by the search, adapt the search so that they are. If it is unclear which element should be adapted to retrieve a certain article, combine that article with each element separately.

Different outcomes are desired for different types of research questions. For instance, in the case of clinical question answering, the researcher will not be satisfied with many references that contain a lot of irrelevant references. A clinical search should be rather specific and is allowed to miss a relevant reference. In the case of an SR, the researchers do not want to miss any relevant reference and are willing to handle many irrelevant references to do so. The search for references to include in an SR should be very sensitive: no included reference should be missed. A search that is too specific or too sensitive for the intended goal can be adapted to become more sensitive or specific. Steps to increase sensitivity or specificity of a search strategy can be found in the supplementary appendix .

13. Check for errors

Errors might not be easily detected. Sometimes clues can be found in the number of results, either when the number of results is much higher or lower than expected or when many retrieved references are not relevant. However, the number expected is often unknown, and very sensitive search strategies will always retrieve many irrelevant articles. Each query should, therefore, be checked for errors.

One of the most frequently occurring errors is missing the Boolean operator “OR.” When no “OR” is added between two search terms, many interfaces automatically add an “AND,” which unintentionally reduces the number of results and likely misses relevant references. One good strategy to identify missing “OR”s is to go to the web page containing the full search strategy, as translated by the database, and using Ctrl-F search for “AND.” Check whether the occurrences of the “AND” operator are deliberate.

Ideally, search strategies should be checked by other information specialists [ 18 ]. The Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) checklist offers good guidance for this process [ 4 ]. Apart from the syntax (especially Boolean operators and field codes) of the search strategy, it is wise to have the search terms checked by the clinician or researcher familiar with the topic. At Erasmus MC, researchers and clinicians are involved during the complete process of structuring and optimizing the search strategy. Each word is added after the combined decision of the searcher and the researcher, with the possibility of directly comparing results with and without the new term.

14. Translate to other databases

To retrieve as many relevant references as possible, one has to search multiple databases. Translation of complex and exhaustive queries between different databases can be very time consuming and cumbersome. The single-line search strategy approach detailed above allows quick translations using the find and replace method in Microsoft Word (<Ctrl-H>).

At Erasmus MC, macros based on the find-and-replace method in Microsoft Word have been developed for easy and fast translation between the most used databases for biomedical and health sciences questions. The schema that is followed for the translation between databases is shown in Figure 2 . Most databases simply follow the structure set by the Embase.com search strategy. The translation from Emtree terms to MeSH terms for MEDLINE in Ovid often identifies new terms that need to be added to the Embase.com search strategy before the translation to other databases.

Schematic representation of translation between databases used at Erasmus University Medical Center

Dotted lines represent databases that are used in less than 80% of the searches.

Using five different macros, a thoroughly optimized query in Embase.com can be relatively quickly translated into eight major databases. Basic search strategies will be created to use in many, mostly smaller, databases, because such niche databases often do not have extensive thesauri or advanced syntax options. Also, there is not much need to use extensive syntax because the number of hits and, therefore, the amount of noise in these databases is generally low. In MEDLINE (Ovid), PsycINFO (Ovid), and CINAHL (EBSCOhost), the thesaurus terms must be adapted manually, as each database has its own custom thesaurus. These macros and instructions for their installation, use, and adaptation are available at bit.ly/databasemacros.

15. Test and reiterate

Ideally, exhaustive search strategies should retrieve all references that are covered in a specific database. For SR search strategies, checking searches for their recall is advised. This can be done after included references have been determined by the authors of the systematic review. If additional papers have been identified through other non-database methods (i.e., checking references in included studies), results that were not identified by the database searches should be examined. If these results were available in the databases but not located by the search strategy, the search strategy should be adapted to try to retrieve these results, as they may contain terms that were omitted in the original search strategies. This may enable the identification of additional relevant results.

A methodology for creating exhaustive search strategies has been created that describes all steps of the search process, starting with a question and resulting in thorough search strategies in multiple databases. Many of the steps described are not new, but together, they form a strong method creating high-quality, robust searches in a relatively short time frame.

Our methodology is intended to create thoroughness for literature searches. The optimization method, as described in step 11, will identify missed synonyms or thesaurus terms, unlike any other method that largely depends on predetermined keywords and synonyms. Using this method results in a much quicker search process, compared to traditional methods, especially because of the easier translation between databases and interfaces (step 13). The method is not a guarantee for speed, since speed depends on many factors, including experience. However, by following the steps and using the tools as described above, searchers can gain confidence first and increase speed through practice.

What is new?

This method encourages searchers to start their search development process using empty syntax first and later adding the thesaurus terms and free-text synonyms. We feel this helps the searcher to focus on the search terms, instead of on the structure of the search query. The optimization method in which new terms are found in the already retrieved articles is used in some other institutes as well but has to our knowledge not been described in the literature. The macros to translate search strategies between interfaces are unique in this method.

What is different compared to common practice?

Traditionally, librarians and information specialists have focused on creating complex, multi-line (also called line-by-line) search strategies, consisting of multiple record sets, and this method is frequently advised in the literature and handbooks [ 2 , 19 – 21 ]. Our method, instead, uses single-line searches, which is critical to its success. Single-line search strategies can be easily adapted by adding or dropping a term without having to recode numbers of record sets, which would be necessary in multi-line searches. They can easily be saved in a text document and repeated by copying and pasting for search updates. Single-line search strategies also allow easy translation to other syntaxes using find-and-replace technology to update field codes and other syntax elements or using macros (step 13).

When constructing a search strategy, the searcher might experience that certain parentheses in the syntax are unnecessary, such as parentheses around all search terms in the title/abstract portion, if there is only one such term, there are double parentheses in the proximity statement, or one of the word groups exists for only one word. One might be tempted to omit those parentheses for ease of reading and management. However, during the optimization process, the searcher is likely to find extra synonyms that might consist of one word. To add those terms to the first query (with reduced parentheses) requires adding extra parentheses (meticulously placing and counting them), whereas, in the latter search, it only requires proper placement of those terms.

Many search methods highly depend on the PICO framework. Research states that often PICO or PICOS is not suitable for every question [ 22 , 23 ]. There are other acronyms than PICO—such as sample, phenomenon of interest, design, evaluation, research type (SPIDER) [ 24 ]—but each is just a variant. In our method, the most important and specific elements of a question are being analyzed for building the best search strategy.

Though it is generally recommended that searchers search both MEDLINE and Embase, most use MEDLINE as the starting point. It is considered the gold standard for biomedical searching, partially due to historical reasons, since it was the first of its kind, and more so now that it is freely available via the PubMed interface. Our method can be used with any database as a starting point, but we use Embase instead of MEDLINE or another database for a number of reasons. First, Embase provides both unique content and the complete content of MEDLINE. Therefore, searching Embase will be, by definition, more complete than searching MEDLINE only. Second, the number of terms in Emtree (the Embase thesaurus) is three times as high as that of MeSH (the MEDLINE thesaurus). It is easier to find MeSH terms after all relevant Emtree terms have been identified than to start with MeSH and translate to Emtree.

At Erasmus MC, the researchers sit next to the information specialist during most of the search strategy design process. This way, the researchers can deliver immediate feedback on the relevance of proposed search terms and retrieved references. The search team then combines knowledge about databases with knowledge about the research topic, which is an important condition to create the highest quality searches.

Limitations of the method

One disadvantage of single-line searches compared to multi-line search strategies is that errors are harder to recognize. However, with the methods for optimization as described (step 11), errors are recognized easily because missed synonyms and spelling errors will be identified during the process. Also problematic is that more parentheses are needed, making it more difficult for the searcher and others to assess the logic of the search strategy. However, as parentheses and field codes are typed before the search terms are added (step 10), errors in parentheses can be prevented.

Our methodology works best if used in an interface that allows proximity searching. It is recommended that searchers with access to an interface with proximity searching capabilities select one of those as the initial database to develop and optimize the search strategy. Because the PubMed interface does not allow proximity searches, phrases or Boolean “AND” combinations are required. Phrase searching complicates the process and is more specific, with the higher risk of missing relevant articles, and using Boolean “AND” combinations increases sensitivity but at an often high loss of specificity. Due to some searchers’ lack of access to expensive databases or interfaces, the freely available PubMed interface may be necessary to use, though it should never be the sole database used for an SR [ 2 , 16 , 25 ]. A limitation of our method is that it works best with subscription-based and licensed resources.

Another limitation is the customization of the macros to a specific institution’s resources. The macros for the translation between different database interfaces only work between the interfaces as described. To mitigate this, we recommend using the find-and-replace functionality of text editors like Microsoft Word to ease the translation of syntaxes between other databases. Depending on one’s institutional resources, custom macros can be developed using similar methods.

Results of the method

Whether this method results in exhaustive searches where no important article is missed is difficult to determine, because the number of relevant articles is unknown for any topic. A comparison of several parameters of 73 published reviews that were based on a search developed with this method to 258 reviews that acknowledged information specialists from other Dutch academic hospitals shows that the performance of the searches following our method is comparable to those performed in other institutes but that the time needed to develop the search strategies was much shorter than the time reported for the other reviews [ 9 ].

CONCLUSIONS

With the described method, searchers can gain confidence in their search strategies by finding many relevant words and creating exhaustive search strategies quickly. The approach can be used when performing SR searches or for other purposes such as answering clinical questions, with different expectations of the search’s precision and recall. This method, with practice, provides a stepwise approach that facilitates the search strategy development process from question clarification to final iteration and beyond.

SUPPLEMENTAL FILE

Acknowledgments.

We highly appreciate the work that was done by our former colleague Louis Volkers, who in his twenty years as an information specialist in Erasmus MC laid the basis for our method. We thank Professor Oscar Franco for reviewing earlier drafts of this article.

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How Inclusive Brands Fuel Growth

• Omar Rodríguez-Vilá,
• Dionne Nickerson,
• Sundar Bharadwaj

Years before the Barbie movie phenomenon, leaders at Mattel became concerned that consumer perceptions of the famous doll were out of sync with demographic trends. The company conducted in-depth research to understand how customers felt about Barbie and to determine whether more-inclusive versions presented a strong market opportunity. The findings led to a new inclusion strategy that affected all areas of the brand—product design, distribution, and commercial activities—and coincided with a period of significant growth. Barbie revenues increased 63% from 2015 to 2022—before the boost from the film.

Research shows that in most industries the perception of inclusion can materially change customers’ likelihood to purchase and willingness to recommend products and services.

This article presents a framework for increasing marketplace inclusion in three areas: seeing the market, which is about market definition, market intelligence, and strategies for growth; serving the market, which involves developing products, packaging, and other commercial practices; and being in the market, which looks at advocacy and the customer experience.

They unlock new sources of value by meeting the needs of underrecognized customers.

Idea in Brief

The opportunity.

Research shows that the perception of inclusion can materially change customers’ likelihood to purchase and willingness to recommend products and services.

The Problem

Despite the many business and societal benefits of marketplace inclusion, there is a systematic lack of it across industries.

The Approach

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie grossed more than $1 billion at the box office in about two weeks. Only 53 films have ever hit that mark (adjusted for inflation). The 2023 movie, which features themes of women’s empowerment, multiculturalism, and inclusiveness, was a divergence from the narrow social and demographic representation of the original tall, thin, white doll that Mattel introduced in 1959.

• OR Omar Rodríguez-Vilá is a professor of marketing practice at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University and the academic director of education at its Business & Society Institute.
• DN Dionne Nickerson is an assistant professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School.
• SB Sundar Bharadwaj is the Coca-Cola Company Chair of Marketing at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. LinkedIn: Sundar Bharadwaj

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Connecting the Chief Sustainability Officer with the Chief Marketing Officer

By Matt Bourn , Sebastian Munden     April 11, 2024    

S ustainability goals are increasingly being aligned with commercial goals of businesses, large and small. This extract from the new book, Sustainable Advertising , by the Advertising Association's communications director Matt Bourn and Ad Net Zero chair Sebastian Munden, considers the importance of the marketing function working hand-in-hand with their sustainability colleagues.

As sustainability efforts of companies continue to grow, many chief sustainability officers are turning their attention beyond their immediate issues to look at their footprint in marketing and advertising. It can only be beneficial to connect efforts in our industry with those experts, especially in the definition of emissions when it comes to marketing and advertising. We spoke to Bill Wescott, managing partner at Brain Oxygen LLC about this.

Why do you think it is so important for the chief sustainability officer to connect and collaborate with the chief marketing officer?

The attention of the C-suite on sustainability and particularly climate issues has been so focused on the physical supply chain, that the marketing and advertising activities have been completely overlooked from an operational emissions perspective. The only time that marketing comes to mind typically is with regard to communicating product sustainability attributes, not on the emissions from marketing and advertising operations. In talking with many chief sustainability officers and top climate experts in leading brands, I discovered none of them have thought about these emissions, but all of them committed to reaching out to the CMOs to get the conversation started.

For more, see:

• Brand Purpose and Sustainability
• We Need to Level Up If We Want to Hit Sustainability Targets

In the absence of this internal support, the marketing function and their value chain partners started to take actions independent of the greenhouse gas accounting systems, standards, and best practices that have been developed over the last two decades. Vendors with proprietary, black box "carbon calculators" selling opaque offsets at many times their market value stepped in to take advantage of the lack of knowledge of buyers who were eager to take some sort of tangible action. In addition to the clear inefficiencies of reinventing the wheel, the real concern is that all the energy and resources spent in these efforts would be rejected in the end by the climate experts in the brands as they would not be able to use the emissions estimates in their official summaries that have to be third-party verified against existing standards. I was surprised at this "Wild West" environment as in my world it is self-evident that serious companies don't make claims or accept claims from others that have not been verified by a reputable third party.

Facilitating CSO-CMO collaborations to accelerate real climate action in the ad sector is now a key focus of mine as it can quickly clear the air of confusion so the parties can focus on meaningful improvements.

How can an improved collaboration between these two areas of a business help the marketing function? With its own operations? And through the way it communicates about the pipeline of more sustainable products and services?

The first major benefit of this collaboration for the marketing function is an increase in the speed and efficiency that comes with alignment with the rest of their company's climate actions. The marketing function can use its leverage to align its value chain with the same climate systems used by the rest of the world. As product offerings become more sustainable via new business models (e.g., circular economy approaches to selling services instead of goods; reducing use of plastics, toxics, limited natural resources), consumers and other stakeholders will be delighted to know that the means of communicating these attributes are also sustainable.

What do you think will be the ultimate benefits of putting sustainability and marketing on the same dashboard for campaign planning, execution, and evaluation?

The marketing function and operations are really just an application of the philosophy of Scope 3 to understand the climate impacts along the entire value chain, quantify and verify them so they can be reported to all stakeholders. This process enables the development of approaches that can then reduce these emissions to the maximum extent possible. These functions deserve to receive the same attention and follow the same standards as every other function on the sustainability dashboard of serious brands.

This extract from Sustainable Advertising  by Matt Bourn and Sebastian Munden is copyright 2024 and reproduced with permission from Kogan Page Ltd. All rights reserved. It can be ordered via the Kogan Page website here and you can save 20 percent when ordering from Kogan Page by using the code ANA at the checkout.

The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.

Matt Bourn is director of communications for the Advertising Association and Ad Net Zero, based in London, UK. With 25 years' experience, previously he was Managing Director of Braben, working for companies such as Sky, Channel 4, Disney and Sony.

Sebastian Munden is a strategy and communications adviser, based in London, UK. He is also chair of WRAP (The Waste & Resources Action Programme) and chair of Ad Net Zero. He worked at Unilever for 30+ years applying the principles of business as a force for good, lastly as CEO of the U.K. and Ireland business.

Product Development Strategy pp 45–78 Cite as

Research Strategy

• Mina Tajvidi 3 &
• Azhdar Karami 3 , 4  

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This chapter sets out the various steps that are necessary in executing this study and thereby satisfying its objectives. It aims to explain in detail all aspects of the research, with particular reference to all of the key theoretical and practical issues involved. This chapter discusses the research design and methodology and the survey. Various research philosophies and approaches presented in literature will be discussed with focuses on their application to this study. This chapter is composed of seven sections which cover the research objectives and questions, research philosophy, research approach, research strategies, research choices, research time horizons, and research techniques and procedures. Each sub-section of this chapter covers one of these aspects of the research. The first sub-section addresses the objective and questions of the study. The first sub-section addresses the objective and questions of the study. The second sub-section presents the research methods and strategy and includes research philosophy, research approach, research design, data collection process and constructing the questionnaire. The third sub-section addresses the conceptual framework and research variables. The fourth sub-section presents the characteristics of SMEs. The fifth sub-section reveals the proposed model and hypotheses. The sixth sub-section presents the research choice and data analysis.

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Tajvidi, M., Karami, A. (2015). Research Strategy. In: Product Development Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137501394_3

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137501394_3

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