Recommendations in research are a crucial component of your discussion section and the conclusion of your thesis, dissertation, or research paper.

As you conduct your research and analyze the data you collected, perhaps there are ideas or results that don’t quite fit the scope of your research topic. Or, maybe your results suggest that there are further implications of your results or the causal relationships between previously studied variables than covered in extant research.

What should recommendations look like?

Recommendations for future research should be:

• Concrete and specific
• Supported with a clear rationale
• Directly connected to your research

Overall, strive to highlight ways other researchers can reproduce or replicate your results to draw further conclusions, and suggest different directions that future research can take, if applicable.

Relatedly, when making these recommendations, avoid:

• Undermining your work, but rather offer suggestions on how future studies can build upon it
• Suggesting recommendations actually needed to complete your argument, but rather ensure that your research stands alone on its own merits
• Using recommendations as a place for self-criticism, but rather as a natural extension point for your work

Building your research recommendation

There are many different ways to frame recommendations, but the easiest is perhaps to follow the formula of research question conclusion recommendation. Here’s an example.

How should your recommendations be written?

As a rule of thumb, try to limit yourself to only the most relevant future recommendations: ones that stem directly from your work. While you can have multiple recommendations for each research conclusion, it is also acceptable to have one recommendation that is connected to more than one conclusion.

These recommendations should be targeted at your audience, specifically toward peers or colleagues in your field that work on similar subjects to your paper or dissertation topic. They can flow directly from any limitations you found while conducting your work, offering concrete and actionable possibilities for how future research can build on anything that your own work was unable to address at the time of your writing.