A research question is "a clear, focused, concise, complex and arguable question around which you center your research. You should ask a question about an issue that you are genuinely curious about."  The Writing Center, GMU.

You need to do this no matter what type of review you are undertaking, and it's often not as easy as it seems!

Follow these steps to try to nail down your research question:

• Choose a broad topic you are interested in, such as “Queensland rainforests” or “young adult literature”.
• Do some quick searches of the literature in this field to help you see what has been researched already, what questions have been raised and how you might focus your research.
• Start asking questions about your general topic, such as “How have the themes of young adult literature changed over the past 20 years?” or “What impact has climate change had on the ecology of Queensland rainforests?
• When you think you've come up with a question, evaluate it:
  • What new knowledge will come out of your research?
  • Is your question very clear?  (This will help you direct your systematic search)
  • Is your question focussed but not too complex? It’s important to find a balance between a question that is too broad, with an enormous body of research attached, and one that is so specific you will find almost no research at all relating to it.

For more helpful information, see:

• Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching (CIRT), Writing a Good Research Question
• Sage Research Methods Online, Developing a Researchable Question.
• NSW Health CIAP module, Asking a clinical question (includes examples and practice).
• The instructional video below from the Laurier University Library in Canada 

Search frameworks are mnemonics which can help you focus your research question. They are also useful in helping you to identify the concepts and terms you will use in your literature search.

PICO is a search framework commonly used in the health sciences to focus clinical questions.  As an example, you work in an aged care facility and are interested in whether cranberry juice might help reduce the common occurrence of urinary tract infections.  The PICO framework would look like this:

Now that the issue has been broken up to its elements, it is easier to turn it into an answerable research question: “Does cranberry juice help reduce urinary tract infections in people living in aged care facilities?”

Other frameworks may be helpful, depending on your question and your field of interest. PICO can be adapted to PICOT (which adds Time) or PICOS (which adds Study design), or PICOC (adding Context).

For qualitative questions you could use

• SPIDER: Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type  

For questions about causes or risk,

• PEO: Population, Exposure, Outcomes

For evaluations of interventions or policies, 

• SPICE: Setting, Population or Perspective, Intervention, Comparison, Evaluation or

• ECLIPSE: Expectation, Client group, Location, Impact, Professionals, SErvice 

See the University of Notre Dame Australia’s examples of some of these frameworks. 

You can also try some PICO examples in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed training site: Using PICO to frame clinical questions.