As far as I have seen, there are only field-specific SE's for questions regarding research methods.  I agree, that it makes sense to ask question about research design and methodology in context of the field of study.  But when studying research methods and research design in preparation for future studies, I am facing a domain of it's own. The literature about research methods is mostly not bound to any field (with some exceptions of really field-specific methods).  This concerns many questions regarding (among others):   Interview design and interview practice, survey design, coding practices, instruments and instrument design, item design Adequate sample sizes, anonymizing data and sensitive data, proper Evaluation Validity, reliability, economy of testing Research ethics and unethical research design   Where would those questions be asked, if not bound to any specific field of study? If there is none, would it make sense to have one like "Research Methods"?  Update:  As I can see there are two pages close to the described above -  and .  While as I can see, Academia is related a lot regarding every day questions of an academic - ranging from juridical and administrative to professional career related questions.  Open science looks very focused on strategies and QA to make Science more accessible in general, like open journals, licensing, publishing and documentation/transparency of research.  Both sites focus in my opinion on other content than research methodology. If nobody has an interest against a proposal, I would tend create one at Area51.
I have an idea or subject that should have a Q&amp;A, and want to propose a new site. How can I do this?  Related:
I have:  \documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{report}   with no special customisation.  In one page, at the end of a section, I have a big figure with two paragraphs of text below it, and these two paragraphs are not enough to fill up the rest of the page.  When I use the \documentclass as above I get some extra white space at the end of the page, which is fine: the vertical spacing from the figure caption and between the two paragraphs is standard and correct.  But if I switch to:  \documentclass[a4paper,11pt,twoside]{report}   I get extra blank space between the figure caption and the 1st paragraph and also between the 1st and 2nd paragraph.  I want to use twoside to set the headings with fancyhdr. How can I get rid of these ugly white spaces? Prevent parameter expansion in shell script I often have to do a recursive search in files. Tired of typing the whole "find/grep" combination all the time, I just created a script with the following line:  find . -name $1 -exec grep $2 {} + 2&gt;/dev/null   The idea is that I should be able to run it as, for example:  myfind '*' hello   The problem is, when '*' gets passed into the script, the script is expanding it to each file in the directory.  I tried putting a quote around $1:   find . -name '$1' -exec grep $2 {} + 2&gt;/dev/null   However, this turns $1 into a literal string.  Would appreciate your help in finding the right syntax. Must be something simple that I am missing. Askers should be able to close their own question as a duplicate How to list of all the tables defined for the database when using active record? How do I get a list of all the tables defined for the database when using active record? Warning  If you're looking for advice how to make your document look like it's been written in Word, this is most likely not the question you're looking for. This question is mostly of theoretical nature, as it results in tiny differences, which will most likely not be noticed by someone who doesn't allow the use of LaTeX.  Questions that might be more helpful for this matter are:           Question  I learned that MS Word uses a slightly different version of the unit "point" (pt) than TeX does:     The 12 point of Word will be PostScript point, which in TeX would be called 12bp. A TeX pt is slightly smaller: it's 1/72.27 inch, while a bp/PostScript point is 1/72 inch. See also    ( in )  I'm writing a paper that would usually be expected to be "typeset" in MS Word, thus I want to use the same font size as Word would.  How do I set a document e.g. in the "12pt" font size that MS Word would use?  In case it matters, I'm using the article document class, Latin Modern (lmodern) as a font with the T1 font encoding and compile with pdfLaTeX, but input on different set-ups is more than welcome. Proper way to do "conditional segue" in iOS5 I accidentally removed some files on a NTFS partition  How can I recover them staying inside Linux without rebooting ? Can the problem of unification of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity be converted into a pure Mathematical problem? I mean to say, can you make someone understand the problem who only knows Mathematics, even if a Physics description is absent? I mean, describing the problem with unification using pure Mathematical formulation.  Can we make the problem seem as if it has nothing to do with the real world and describe it only as a problem of mathematics? How do I change the `enumerate` list format to use letters instead of the default Arabic numerals? I've seen documentation whereby an \alph command is put around the \begin{enumerate} somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure how that operates... Why do I get different values for $x from the snippets below?  #!/bin/bash  x=1 echo fred &gt; junk ; while read var ; do x=55 ; done &lt; junk echo x=$x  #    x=55 .. I'd expect this result  x=1 cat junk | while read var ; do x=55 ; done echo x=$x  #    x=1 .. but why?  x=1 echo fred | while read var ; do x=55 ; done echo x=$x  #    x=1  .. but why? Is there a specific reason for having a very short window for passengers to get to the boarding gate before closing it? I am not a frequent traveler but it's been like this with all the flights I have been on. Here is the most recent example:  Below is my boarding pass    As you can see Gate Closes at 20:20  Here is the departures board at 18:32, clearly it says that they will announce the boarding gate at 20:10  ?!    I was hoping they will do that earlier but at 19:41 it's still the same    In fact they announced it at 20:11 but since I was freaking out and had to leg it to the gate I didn't have the time to take a photo.  You might think 9 minutes is enough, well below are the times required to reach the gates from the closest place to them     And that's for a healthy young person, no way my grandmother could be able to be at the gates within 9 minutes.  Is there a specific reason? it's not like they allocate the gate dynamically! The staff must have known about the gate hours ago as I don't expect the pilot to drive the airplane from the garage to the gate within 9 minutes? python get only class attribute no superclasses How does the 'passwd' command gain root user permissions? How does Linux know that it has to give euid 0 (uid of root) to only certain process like passwd, setuid, etc.  If a process can gain root permissions, will it not lead to potential security breaches in the Linux platform?   For example, if I write a program that can can gain root user permissions like passwd, I may corrupt important system files like /etc/passwd, /etc/groups.   How does Linux manage to still be secure? Delimiter is being changed with fields I have a file with values organized in columns, and separated by commas, as in the file below:   324,01,1,113333600000,1,, 016,01,1,134954200000,1,, 770,01,1,109069200000,1,, 853,01,1,111518800000,1,,   When I use the following awk command, the delimiter is being changed from commas to spaces   Code:  awk -F, '{$4=$4/1024}{print $0}'   The output becomes:   324 01 1 110677343.75 1   016 01 1 131791210.93 1   770 01 1 106512890.62 1   853 01 1 108905078.12 1    How can I change the value of the field without changing the delimiter? Seriously, I had not noticed e.g. Jeff's edit  had he not also retagged my question. Is there a way to show that $\sqrt{p_{n}} < n$? Is there a way to show that $\sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; n$?  In , I show that $f_{2}(x)=\frac{x}{ln(x)} - \sqrt{x}$ is ascending, for $\forall x\geq e^{2}$. As a result, $\forall n \geq 3$ $$\frac{p_{n}}{ln(p_{n})} - \sqrt{p_{n}}\leq \frac{p_{n+1}}{ln(p_{n+1})} - \sqrt{p_{n+1}}$$ Also (and as a result), $\forall n \geq 3$ $$ \frac{p_{n}}{ln(p_{n})} - \sqrt{p_{n}} &gt; 0$$ Or $$ \frac{\pi (p_{n})}{p_{n}/ln(p_{n})} &lt; \frac{\pi (p_{n})}{\sqrt{p_{n}}}$$  According to  $$\displaystyle\smash{\lim_{n \to \infty }}\frac{\pi (p_{n})}{p_{n}/ln(p_{n})}=1$$ Or, $\forall \varepsilon &gt;0$, $\exists N(\varepsilon )$: $\forall n&gt;N(\varepsilon )$ $$1- \varepsilon &lt; \frac{\pi (p_{n})}{p_{n}/ln(p_{n})} &lt; 1+ \varepsilon$$ Or $$1- \varepsilon &lt; \frac{\pi (p_{n})}{p_{n}/ln(p_{n})} &lt; \frac{\pi (p_{n})}{\sqrt{p_{n}}}$$ As a result $\forall \varepsilon &gt;0$, $\exists N(\varepsilon )$: $\forall n&gt;N(\varepsilon )$ $$(1 - \varepsilon ) \cdot  \sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; \pi (p_{n}) = n$$  But this is not enough.  Interestingly,  is true iff function $f_{4}(x)=\pi (x) - \sqrt{x}$ is strictly ascending ($x &lt; y \Rightarrow f(x) &lt; f(y)$) for prime arguments.  If $f_{4}(p_{n}) &lt; f_{4}(p_{n+1})$ then $$\pi (p_{n}) - \sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; \pi (p_{n+1}) - \sqrt{p_{n+1}}$$ Or $$\sqrt{p_{n+1}} - \sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; \pi (p_{n+1}) - \pi (p_{n}) =1$$  And vice-versa, if $$\sqrt{p_{n+1}} - \sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; 1$$ Then $$-\sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; -\sqrt{p_{n+1}} + 1$$ Or $$\pi (p_{n})-\sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; \pi (p_{n}) + 1 -\sqrt{p_{n+1}} = \pi (p_{n+1}) -\sqrt{p_{n+1}}$$  So, if Andrica's conjecture is true then $\forall n \geq 3$ $$\pi (p_{n})-\sqrt{p_{n}} &gt; 0$$ Or $$\sqrt{p_{n}} &lt; \pi (p_{n})= n$$ What does linear time series refer to? What are the general rules regarding when can you refreeze food that was frozen and then thawed in the fridge? and what are the reasons behind them? (Hygiene? Food quality?). Let's assume for the sake of the argument that the items were in a non-frozen state only a few hours.  To be more specific, I'm interested in the application of these rules for  - Ginger garlic paste - Dough - Indian Curries - Green Chilly paste - Frozen green peas What are metaclasses in Python? I get a "serious errors while checking the disk drives for /boot" error while booting I have just set up my new system by creating three partitions on a whole hard disk (/boot, /home, swap and /). I saw  article and now I am getting those errors and the system provide me with some options: (I to ignore, S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery).   I am forced to choose skip mounting because I don't know what manual recovery is. Despite the error I get I think that the system boots okay because I can use the system but this error is very annoying.