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One catalogue of research methods — learn how each one works, when to use it, and what it can’t do.

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8,178 methods11 fields7 method families40 languages

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FieldHealth & Medicine716 Psychology570 Business & Finance410 Engineering330 Life Sciences263 Education261 Research Practice

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248

Natural Sciences236

Social Sciences185

Environment & Sustainability160

MethodStatistics1,836 AI & ML1,661 Decision Sciences932 Research Methods1,354 Measurement1,745 Causal & Evidence532 Research Practice118

29 methods in Social Sciences · AI & MLClear

Methods at the intersection of your two filters.

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Acoustic Phonetics

Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds using instrumentation to measure and analyze sound waves. Pioneered by Peter Ladefoged and Kenneth Stevens, this method uses spectrograms, formant analysis, and waveform measurements to characterize vowels, consonants, and prosodic features wit

Collostructional Analysis

Collostructional analysis is a family of corpus-based methods, introduced by Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Th. Gries in 2003, that quantify the mutual attraction or repulsion between specific words (lexemes) and the grammatical constructions they occur in. Rooted in construction grammar, it treats a construction — su

Comparative Method

The Comparative Method is a foundational technique in historical linguistics for reconstructing ancestral languages and establishing genetic relationships between related languages. Pioneered by Sir William Jones in 1786, it systematically compares phonological, morphological, and lexical features across languages to i

Corpus Concordance Analysis

Corpus concordance analysis is a core corpus-linguistic technique that retrieves every occurrence of a search word or phrase from a large body of machine-readable text and displays them in keyword-in-context (KWIC) format — the target term aligned in a central column with its surrounding co-text. By reading and sorting

Corpus Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics is the study of language based on large, representative collections of texts (corpora) processed by computer. Pioneered by John Sinclair and others, the method uses statistical analysis, concordancing, and computational tools to examine patterns of actual language use. Corpus linguistics has transfor

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) is a mixed-methods approach that combines the quantitative power of corpus linguistics with the interpretive depth of discourse analysis to investigate how meanings, evaluations, and ideologies are constructed across large collections of text. Pioneered by Alan Partington and co

Dialectometry

Dialectometry is a quantitative method for measuring linguistic distances between dialects or languages using objective metrics applied to phonological, lexical, or phonetic data. Pioneered by Jean Seguy in 1973, dialectometry compares word lists, pronunciations, or phonetic transcriptions across speech varieties to ca

Electropalatography

Electropalatography (EPG) is an instrumental method for measuring tongue-to-palate contact during speech by using a specially designed artificial palate fitted with an array of sensors. Developed by William John Hardcastle in the 1970s, EPG provides detailed real-time visualization of articulation and has applications

Geometric Morphometrics

Geometric morphometrics is a quantitative analytical method that captures, analyzes, and compares the shapes of biological structures (bones, teeth, pottery) using coordinate data from landmarks and outlines. Developed by Fred Bookstein in the 1990s, GMM provides a rigorous statistical framework for studying shape vari

Glottochronology

Glottochronology, or lexicostatistics, is a quantitative method in historical linguistics that estimates the time of divergence between related languages based on the proportion of shared cognates in their basic vocabularies. Developed by Morris Swadesh in 1950, the method assumes that core vocabulary items change at a

HPSG

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based grammatical framework developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag in 1987. HPSG represents linguistic information (phonological, syntactic, semantic) in typed feature structures and derives well-formed expressions through constraints on these structures. Unli

Internal Reconstruction

Internal Reconstruction is a historical linguistic method that reconstructs earlier stages of a single language by identifying internal inconsistencies, morphological irregularities, and distributional patterns within the language itself. Unlike the Comparative Method, which relies on comparing related languages, Inter

Keyness Analysis

Keyness analysis identifies the words that are characteristically frequent (or infrequent) in a target corpus relative to a reference corpus, using statistical tests to measure how unexpected each word's frequency is. Introduced by Mike Scott in 1997, it answers the question 'what is this text or collection distinctive

Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) Analysis

Keyword-in-context (KWIC) analysis is the indexing and display technique that presents every occurrence of a chosen keyword aligned in a fixed central column, flanked by a set span of the words that precede and follow it. Invented by H. P. Luhn in 1960 to index technical literature, the KWIC format became the standard

Linguistic Ethnography

Linguistic Ethnography is a qualitative research approach combining ethnographic fieldwork with detailed linguistic analysis to understand language use in cultural context. Developed by researchers like Ben Rampton, it examines how people use language within communities, institutions, and social interactions while payi

Minimalist Program

The Minimalist Program (MP) is a framework for generative syntax developed by Noam Chomsky in 1995, designed to explain linguistic structure while assuming the fewest possible theoretical mechanisms. The program seeks principles that are simple, elegant, and motivated by language evolution. It addresses core questions:

Multidimensional Register Analysis

Multidimensional (MD) analysis is a corpus-linguistic method, developed by Douglas Biber in the 1980s, for describing how language varies across registers — speech versus writing, conversation versus academic prose, and so on. Its central idea is that many individual linguistic features (pronouns, passives, nominalizat

Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Multimodal Discourse Analysis is a method for examining how meaning is created through the integration of multiple modes of communication: language, image, sound, gesture, and spatial arrangement. Developed by Gunther Kress, Theo Van Leeuwen, and others, this approach recognizes that in contemporary communication—from

N-gram Analysis

N-gram analysis is a corpus-linguistic technique that extracts and ranks every contiguous sequence of n words (or characters) in a corpus, exposing the recurrent multi-word units — two-word bigrams, three-word trigrams, and longer 'lexical bundles' — that make up a register or text type. By counting how often each sequ

N400/P600 Analysis

N400/P600 Analysis is a neurocognitive method using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure event-related potentials (ERPs) that reflect brain responses to linguistic stimuli. The N400 component (a negative deflection at 400 ms) indexes semantic processing and surprise; the P600 component (a positive deflection at 600

Optimality Theory

Optimality Theory (OT) is a constraint-based framework for modeling phonology and syntax, developed by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1993. The core idea is that languages produce the optimal output that best satisfies a ranked hierarchy of universal constraints. Rather than listing rules, OT explains linguistic phe

Part-of-Speech Tagging

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is the task of assigning each word (token) in a text its grammatical category — noun, verb, adjective, preposition, and finer distinctions such as past-tense verb or comparative adjective — drawn from a fixed tagset. Because the same word form can belong to different categories depending on

Phylogenetic Linguistics

Computational phylogenetic linguistics borrows the statistical machinery developed in evolutionary biology — Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and distance-based network methods — and applies it to coded linguistic data, chiefly cognate-judged basic vocabulary, to infer language family trees and estimate when bra

Prototype Theory

Prototype Theory is a framework for understanding how humans categorize concepts, proposing that categories are organized around prototypes—the most typical or central members. Developed by Eleanor Rosch in 1973, the theory challenges classical logic's view that categories have fixed boundaries defined by necessary-and

Psycholinguistic Eye-Tracking

Psycholinguistic Eye-Tracking is a method that measures eye movements during reading or visual processing to investigate how the mind processes language. Pioneered by Keith Rayner, eye-tracking reveals which parts of text attract attention, how long readers spend on different words, and how eye movements relate to comp

Semantic Feature Analysis

Semantic Feature Analysis, or Componential Analysis, is a method for understanding word meaning by decomposing concepts into minimal meaningful units called semantic features or components. Developed by Ward Goodenough in 1956, this approach represents the meaning of words as bundles of features (e.g., 'woman' = [human

Semantic Prosody Analysis

Semantic prosody analysis is a corpus-linguistic method for uncovering the attitudinal or evaluative coloring a word acquires from the company it habitually keeps. Developed within John Sinclair's work on collocation and named by Bill Louw in 1993, it rests on the observation that some words carry a consistent positive

Speech Act Theory

Speech Act Theory is a framework in pragmatics developed by J. L. Austin and refined by John Searle, analyzing language as action. The core insight is that utterances are not merely vehicles for propositions but acts with pragmatic effects: 'I pronounce you married' creates a marriage; 'Please close the door' issues a

Systemic Functional Linguistics

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a framework for analyzing language developed by Michael Halliday, viewing language as a system of meaning-making choices where speakers select from available options to express meanings. The approach emphasizes the relationship between language form and social context, analyzing