Thread: remind etc.
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Old 15-Apr-2007, 13:35
Philly Philly is offline
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Default Re: remind etc.

Hi Jiang

Using "make research" simply does not sound natural to me at all. Perhaps it is used in some variety of English other than British or American English. I simply have never heard it.

I've now done some searches of the BNC (British National Corpus). This is a good tool for checking usage.

Here is a BNC search for "make research into":
SARA Search Results
There are no results at all.

Doing a BNC search for "made research into" gets one single result. However, the word 'make' is not used to mean 'conduct'. Instead it means 'change (into)'.
SARA Search Results

BNC searches for "research made into" and "research that was made" also yield no usage results at all.

A BNC search for "do research into", "done research into" and "do research on" yields these results:
SARA Search Results
SARA Search Results
SARA Search Results

Searching the BNC for "do research" gets lots of results:
SARA Search Results

Summary:
If you want to talk about "conducting research" the standard collocation is "do research". You can also use word 'research' as a verb.
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