The Researcher's Field Guide
Research comes with questions no one teaches you to ask.
You learn how to conduct a study. Then come journal rankings, publication fees, peer review, citation counts, research impact, and a surprising number of things you were apparently supposed to know. The Field Guide is for everything between "I have a research question" and "Wait, how does this work?"
5
Research Parts
769
Research Topics
1,223
Published Guides
18,800+
Guides in Development
Where are you right now?
Research rarely feels linear when you're doing it. This roadmap organizes the questions you are likely to encounter from the first idea to what happens long after publication.
Protect Your Research
Understand research ethics and integrity, protect participants and research data, address informed consent and conflicts of interest, and meet the ethical responsibilities that apply from study planning through publication.
Collect Your Data
Plan systematic research data collection, develop appropriate instruments, manage and protect your data, and document how information was collected so it remains accurate, interpretable, organized, and ready for analysis.
Analyze Your Data
Choose appropriate data analysis methods, evaluate assumptions, interpret quantitative or qualitative results, and turn raw research data into defensible findings without claiming more than the evidence supports.
Write Your Paper
Write a clear research paper that communicates your problem, methods, results, and conclusions while addressing reporting guidelines, contributor roles, and the responsibilities involved in preparing a manuscript.
Choose Your Journal
Choose a legitimate journal that fits the paper and understand journal indexing, rankings, metrics, open access, publication fees, predatory publishing, and other factors that shape a responsible journal submission strategy.
Navigate Peer Review
Prepare and submit your research paper, understand editorial screening, respond effectively to reviewer comments, and navigate manuscript revision, rejection, resubmission, or acceptance with greater confidence.
Share Your Research
Navigate research publication after acceptance, from proofs to indexing, repositories, academic SEO, researcher profiles, and responsible research promotion that helps your published work become visible and discoverable.
Measure Your Impact
Understand research impact through citations, research metrics, altmetrics, visibility, and other indicators while recognizing the limits of using numerical measures to evaluate research quality, influence, or importance.
What are you trying to figure out?
Search thousands of guides covering research methods, literature reviews, publishing, peer review, citations, research impact, and more.
Research comes with questions nobody puts in the syllabus.
You learn how to formulate a research question, choose a method, and write a paper. Then the questions start.
Is this journal legitimate? What does Q1 actually mean? Do I need to pay to publish? How long should peer review take? Why do Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar report different citation counts? What exactly counts as research impact?
The Researcher's Field Guide is where I try to answer those questions: clearly enough to be useful, but without pretending that research and academic publishing are simpler than they really are.
About Manuel Garcia →Practical answers, with the caveats that matter.
Each guide is built around a question researchers actually encounter.
The answer comes first.
You should not need to read 2,000 words before finding the answer to the question that brought you here.
Context stays attached.
Research practices differ across disciplines, journals, databases, institutions, publishers, and countries. Those differences matter.
Metrics are interpreted, not worshipped.
Quartiles, citation counts, impact factors, h-indices, and other indicators can be informative, but only when their limitations are understood.
Claims lead back to sources.
Where policies, definitions, metrics, or publishing practices are involved, the guides point to authoritative and primary sources whenever possible.
One research question usually leads to another.
Browse the complete Field Guide when you know what you're looking for, or follow the Research Journey when you want to see how the pieces fit together.