How should you track research questions during a doctorate?
Track research questions as versioned records rather than lines in a document. Give each one a status, note where it came from, and preserve every earlier phrasing. How a question changed over several years is itself scholarly evidence — and the original wording is often the more revealing one.
Questions are not static
The question you defend rarely resembles the question you started with. It narrows, splits, absorbs a framework, or gets abandoned for the better question hiding underneath.
Overwriting the earlier version destroys the record of that development — which is exactly what a committee will ask you to explain.
A workable structure
Status: emerging, active, refining, answered, parked, retired. Most questions spend real time in more than one.
Origin: the reading, annotation, conversation, gap, or life experience that produced it. Origin is what lets you explain why the question is yours.
Hierarchy: sub-questions belong to parents. A dissertation is usually one question with three or four children.
Keep a bank for what you are not pursuing
Most good questions arrive at the wrong moment. Parking them with a note — rather than deleting them — turns the overflow of a doctorate into the beginning of a research agenda.
Years later, that bank is often the most valuable file a new faculty member owns.
Common questions
How many research questions should a dissertation have?
Most have one central question with two to four sub-questions. If you have eight, you likely have two projects.
What if my question changes late?
That is common and not a failure. What matters is being able to show the reasoning that led there — which is why version history is worth keeping.