---
name: research-field-evidence-guide
description: Use when planning how to find and evaluate research evidence in a particular discipline or interdisciplinary question.
---

# Field-specific evidence guide

Clarify the field, research question, type of claim, intended use and access constraints. A treatment-effect question, a theoretical derivation, a numerical benchmark and an interpretive qualitative question require different sources and validity checks. Avoid assigning a universal ranking of study types to all disciplines.

Identify likely primary sources, specialist indexes, repositories, standards, data or code relevant to the question. Verify current database coverage, access conditions and search syntax from authoritative documentation when they matter. Build a reproducible search plan with concepts, synonyms, source choices, dates and supplementary citation discovery; distinguish planned searches from those actually run.

Describe appraisal questions appropriate to the field: for example design and confounding in observational studies, identification and sensitivity for causal estimates, assumptions and counterexamples for theory, discretization and convergence for computation, or sampling and interpretive context for qualitative work. Adapt the list to the question rather than treating every item as mandatory. Record contradictory findings and missing sources.

Provide an editable field guide with source choices, search terms, inclusion boundaries, appraisal criteria and a record template. Link sources actually checked and flag any unverified access or coverage. A guide supports a later investigation; it does not establish a literature consensus, exhaustive search or research finding.