Library Guides: Literature searching for Health Sciences and Medicine: Your research question

What makes a good research question?

Having a well-formed research question is essential to a successful literature review.

There may be specific requirements, and it is often done in collaboration with a supervisor, mentor or client, but there are some general principles that apply.

What makes a good research question?

Keep it
clear

Clearly state what you are hoping to find out.

Manageable scope

Not too broad and not too narrow.

Relevant

Is it worth asking? Can you access the research you need?

Answerable

Make sure it is a question (not a statement) and that it can be answered.

Spotlight on scope

The scope of a research question means the boundaries of what is included.

Selecting the right scope is essential for any research question, but particularly review types such as systematic and scoping reviews where you are required to check every result you retrieve.

Examples

Scope	Examples
time period	previous 10 years Covid-19 pandemic
location	Australia Pacific islands Hospital
population/demographic group	Infants 0-3 years old Prisoners University students Women over 60 Single-income households healthcare workers
instances or events	diagnoses surgery
conditions or experiences	pregnancy anxiety osteoarthritis
subtopics	Sport > Athletics

Frameworks

It may be useful, or a requirement of your assessment, to consider your question in a framework such as:

PICO (clinical questions),
PCC (scoping review)
SPIDER (qualitative questions).

Our Evidence-based practice guide has more details on these frameworks.

How scope affects searching

Change scope to change results

Broader
=
increase

Narrower
=
decrease

If you are not finding any relevant results perhaps it's not an issue with your search, but rather there is nothing to find as your scope is too narrow.

Alternatively your scope may be too large and there is too much to look through (more relevant for Scoping and Systematic review)

Activity: Think about scope

Think of ways to make the research question broader or narrower
Click Broader or Narrower to reveal alternative research questions
Clink the PubMed links to see the difference in search numbers

Paediatric mental health presentations to emergency departments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further resources

Watch this video (7 minutes) on developing a research question from University of Melbourne Academic Skills.

Library guides

There are additional considerations for specific types of research, see the following library guides for more: