9 How to Write a Research Protocol

No football coach would ever let his team take the field without a “game plan.” The research protocol is the game plan for your project, your vision of what you will accomplish when you “take the field” with your research team. The document describes the reasoning behind and the process of the research project that you have in mind [1]. It tells what you hope to accomplish and how you will get it done. It also imposes a discipline, requiring you and your team to anticipate every step of the project before the first subject is recruited. This body of the research protocol more-or-less follows the IMRAD model, an acronym for the words Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. We will return to this model in Chap. 11, which discusses how to write a report of a research study.