10Min Research Methodology - 2 - How to Start the Research Process?

Basic research is framed as a systematic way to extend existing knowledge—especially by building on what is already available in the literature. The starting point is not a topic picked at random, but a clear decision about the research area and the specific gap to pursue. If a scholar cannot identify what research already exists, there is nothing solid to extend; the literature becomes the foundation for any later dissertation, thesis, or publishable paper.

The process begins with defining the broad area of interest. In social sciences and business research, the field is often broken into major domains such as HRM, marketing, and finance. Once HRM is chosen, the next step is narrowing further into sub-areas within HRM—examples include Training and Development (TND), Learning and Development (L&D), leadership, Knowledge Management, internal marketing, employee development, and organizational learning. The key requirement is focus: without narrowing, it becomes impossible to identify what exactly will be studied.

Narrowing can be done by selecting a specific angle inside a sub-area. For instance, within leadership there are multiple styles—servant leadership, charismatic leadership, transactional leadership, transformational leadership, smart leadership, and knowledge-oriented leadership. The same logic applies to organizational learning: instead of asking a vague question like “what is happening,” a scholar must decide what aspect of organizational learning will be investigated.

To move from a narrowed topic to actual research work, the transcript emphasizes the need to consult existing scholarship. Research is described as a systematic process that culminates in a dissertation, thesis, or research paper intended for publication. To understand what is happening in a chosen area, a scholar should look for existing research—books, but more importantly articles and research papers produced by other researchers. The “latest research” is typically found in journal articles, which are published on a schedule such as annually, twice a year, monthly, or quarterly.

Journal articles are organized for identification and retrieval using volume numbers, issue numbers, and page numbers. Multiple articles can appear in a single journal, and each article’s location in that journal is tracked through these bibliographic details. The transcript also highlights a practical question that drives the next phase of the research process: where to find journals and how to access the articles inside them. That leads directly to the role of databases—where journals are stored and searchable—setting up the next session’s focus on database discovery and article referencing.

Overall, the core insight is that starting research means narrowing a topic inside a defined domain, then grounding the work in journal-based literature so the final academic output can genuinely extend what is already known.