Physician Associates research skills guide: Home

As you read about your topic, you will hopefully start to identify more specific areas or angles that are interesting and that you want to follow up; one of these may turn into your eventual research question.

Finding a research question may take some trial and error, so don’t panic if you don’t hit on the question straight away. Take some time to read and explore.

A top tip for finding a research question is to ask yourself questions about what you have found out. The kinds of questions to ask yourself, once you have done some initial reading, may include:

• What has been found out already about my topic?
• What is left to find out / where is more research needed?
• What do researchers agree about in relation to my topic?
• What do researchers disagree about in relation to my topic?
• What methods do people use to investigate my topic?
• What methods are more favoured, and why?
• Can the methods or process be applied to another related area? (e.g. another similar enzyme / gene etc)
• Where are the barriers to progress or challenges in my topic? Why?

For more on this watch this short video tutorial on defining a research question:

There is also a section on going from a topic to a research question in the following study guide:

Gantt charts

When planning a research project a timeline or Gantt Chart is usually produced to identify the actions/objectives that you will need to complete to meet the research aim of your identified preliminary research. You can link your timeline to these specific actions/research objectives.

The Gantt chart will:

• show the time allocated to each task and the dependency between tasks;
• establish the feasibility of your plan and as a baseline against which to measure progress;

The chart may need to be revised at each project planning meeting.