> Research context — what has been established, and what has been ruled out — from The Handover, the-handover.org/docs/research-context
> Authors: Leon Mallett (captivated.online) with Claude Code · Last confirmed working: 2026-09-18 on Claude Code 2026-09
> © Captivated Ltd — free to use in your own work, not to redistribute as a collection. the-handover.org/licence

This sits at the root of a research project and holds what an agent cannot work
out by looking: what the project is actually for, what counts as evidence here,
and what has already been tried and closed. The working agreement covers where
the work stops; this covers what it is working from.

**The question:** {{question}}
**What counts as evidence:** {{evidence_bar}}
**Dead ends are recorded in:** {{dead_ends_path}}

## The question behind the question

The brief is frequently a proxy. *Which competitors raised prices* may really be
*are we about to be undercut*, and those have different answers and different
evidence.

State the real one, because **an agent optimising the stated proxy competently
is the most expensive failure available here** — it produces defensible work
that answers the wrong thing, and nothing in the output signals it.

## What counts as evidence, which is not a general question

A clinical reviewer and a market analyst both say "evidence" and mean
incompatible things. One will not accept a preprint; the other will not wait for
peer review and is right not to.

This cannot be inferred from the material, and getting it wrong is not
recoverable by working harder — a body of sources gathered to the wrong standard
has to be gathered again.

## Dead ends — the section this document exists for

A dead end is an avenue that closed: the database with nothing in it, the search
term that returned noise, the promising lead that turned out to be about
something else, the person who did not reply.

**It is the most expensive thing in a research project to rediscover and the
first thing lost**, because it lives in one person's head and produces no
artefact. A session starting cold walks straight back into it, because nobody
told it not to — and it will do so competently, which is what makes the loss
invisible.

Three things per entry, in {{dead_ends_path}}:

- **what was tried** — specific enough to not be repeated by accident
- **why it closed** — the mechanism, not the mood
- **what would reopen it** — the condition under which it is worth another go

That third line is what separates a map from a list of failures. Without it the
record becomes a wall of no, which people stop adding to and then stop reading.

**Write it as it happens.** At the end of a project it is already gone; the
avenues that closed in week two are not recoverable in week nine, and the ones
that felt too trivial to record are exactly the ones that get repeated.

## How firmly each thing is held

Research accumulates three kinds of claim and they are not interchangeable:

- **Established** — there is evidence, and it meets {{evidence_bar}}.
- **Argued** — somebody reasoned it out and wrote the reasoning down. Weaker
  than established, and it must never be reported as though it were.
- **Assumed** — nobody has checked, and the work proceeds as if.

Mark which. The distinction erodes on its own: after a few months *we reasoned
about this carefully* and *we verified this* compress into the same sentence,
and the assumption that was load-bearing becomes a finding nobody re-examines.

## Who has already been asked

Approaches to people are not repeatable. An agent that emails a source who
declined last month, or re-asks a question already answered in correspondence,
spends something that cannot be got back.

Record who has been contacted, what they said, and whether they may be
approached again.

## Where this lives

Beside the sources and the notes, in the project folder — not in a separate tool
where it will be written once and read never.

**Without version control nothing records when this changed.** Date it by hand
when you revise it, particularly {{evidence_bar}}: a standard that quietly moved
is worse than none, because the material gathered under the old one still looks
current.