Prospective doctoral students or anybody who wishes to undertake research activities find often difficult to know what research is about, how the settings are where research takes place, and how results are presented and communicated. In addition, for people who want to make innovative contributions within an organization is important to tell apart research from what is not, and where to find the results.

In the supply chain field, there are two additional difficulties. On the one hand, the lack of a generally accepted definition of supply chain. On the other, the fact that, alongside research publications, others proliferate that, although being rather informative, speculative or even falling in self-help literature field, are sometimes presented as if they were search results.

The text is a tool to answer the questions implicit in the above considerations, in order to reduce the time elapsed between the moment the student decides to do research and when he or she starts to really do it, and thus contribute to improve productivity and quality of research.