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A baseline is a reference point established before the change, intervention, or follow-up of interest. It can be essential for some questions, useful for others, and unnecessary when the study does not depend on measuring a starting condition.
Read Guide →Data collection methods make different trade-offs between depth, breadth, standardization, and flexibility. Understanding those trade-offs can help you choose a method that fits what your research question actually needs.
Read Guide →A representative sample is meaningful only in relation to a specified population. Learn what representativeness actually requires, how researchers assess it, and why not every worthwhile study needs a statistically representative sample.
Read Guide →A research protocol benefits from review by people who can evaluate its scientific logic, methods, analysis, feasibility, and ethical implications. The right reviewers depend on the study, and formal ethics review should not be confused with the broader methodological review a protocol may need.
Read Guide →Preregistration records important research decisions before the results are known, while Registered Reports add peer review before the study is completed. Neither requires researchers to predict everything perfectly or abandon legitimate changes and exploration.
Read Guide →Preregistration creates a time-stamped record of important research decisions before the relevant results are known. Its main value is making it easier to distinguish advance plans from decisions influenced by the data.
Read Guide →Preregistration records what you planned before seeing the relevant results; it does not require you to follow a flawed or impractical plan forever. Changes can be legitimate when they are disclosed, justified, and interpreted appropriately.
Read Guide →A protocol describes how you plan to conduct a study; preregistration creates a time-stamped record of research decisions before the relevant results are known. The same document can sometimes serve both purposes, but the concepts are not interchangeable.
Read Guide →Preregistration records a study plan before the relevant results are known. A Registered Report adds prospective journal peer review and in-principle acceptance, making publication less dependent on how the results turn out.
Read Guide →Preregistration can make important research decisions more transparent and encourage advance planning, but it cannot turn weak methods into strong ones. A preregistered study still needs to be evaluated on its design, measurement, sampling, analysis, execution, and interpretation.
Read Guide →Research ethics and research integrity overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Ethics asks whether research is ethically defensible, while integrity concerns whether research is conducted and represented in ways that uphold the standards and values of trustworthy research.
Read Guide →An IRB or research ethics committee does more than inspect your consent form. It evaluates whether the study is ethically acceptable as a whole, including its design, risks, participant selection, consent process, privacy protections, and safeguards.
Read Guide →Researchers do not universally need final ethics approval before applying for funding, and some funders request approval later in the award process. What matters is that required ethics approval is obtained before the covered human-participant research begins and according to the funder's specific conditions.
Read Guide →Research design is not separate from research ethics. An ethics committee needs to understand how a study is designed because poor or inappropriate methods can expose participants to burdens without a reasonable prospect of producing useful knowledge.
Read Guide →An ethics committee may request a change intended to protect participants that also creates a methodological problem. Learn how to identify the underlying ethical concern, explain the methodological consequence, and propose a defensible alternative.
Read Guide →A delay in ethics review can threaten research tied to an outbreak, event, policy change, school term, disaster, or other closing window. Urgency matters, but it does not ordinarily replace the need for appropriate ethics review.
Read Guide →Not every analytical adjustment requires a new ethics review, but some changes can alter study outcomes, data use, scientific validity, or the research described in the approved protocol. The significance depends on what changes and why.
Read Guide →Publication usually creates substantial practical limits on withdrawing an individual's contribution because findings have already entered the scholarly record. Researchers must distinguish stopping future uses of identifiable data from attempting to reverse analyses or publications already completed.
Read Guide →Research risk is not limited to physical injury. Learn how to identify possible harms, distinguish their probability from their severity, and judge whether exposing participants to them can be ethically justified.
Read Guide →Research integrity is more than avoiding misconduct. It means conducting, communicating, reviewing, and correcting research in ways that make the work trustworthy and accountable.
Read Guide →Poor research practice can make a study unreliable without automatically constituting research misconduct. The distinction depends on the conduct, applicable standards, evidence, and sometimes the researcher's state of mind.
Read Guide →Researchers should preserve enough original data, metadata, processing history, code, and contextual records to trace reported results back to their sources. Authenticity is much easier to demonstrate when provenance survives alongside the final figure or dataset.
Read Guide →Plagiarism in research is not limited to copying sentences. It can involve taking another person's words, ideas, processes, results, or other intellectual contributions without giving appropriate credit.
Read Guide →Plagiarism can involve an idea even when none of the original wording is copied. The central issue is whether an identifiable intellectual contribution has been appropriated without appropriate credit.
Read Guide →Researchers are expected to reuse methods, but that does not mean methodological contributions are attribution-free. The key distinction is between using a method and claiming another researcher's distinctive process or innovation as your own.
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