What steroids do what? Growing bitch tits? Shrunken balls/HCG? Getting fatter-by-the-day on-cycle? High prolactin/estrogen - need meds? Low test/other hormones - need meds? PeePee problems? Forming an effective PCT? Mixing nor19's or even nor19 only cycles? caber on hand? Confused about conflicting information/opinions? Better off finding out yourself, for certain....!

The list of issues AAS folks face is lengthy but repetitive. I see so much good advice not followed and bad advice dished out regularly, coupled with co-signing those with un-researched ideas. If people took responsibility for the basics, then this forum could develop some of the most interesting ideas out there, or just cut through the BS! People need to research, we say it here to newbs every day. Hopefully this post can help us all to cut through the crap, whether its bad advice given by (in)experienced people or gym bro's or even well meaning experienced folks.

The options are: Research it yourself and discuss/evaluate (and) discuss/evaluate/test/evaluate/discuss OR ask the bro's on the boards & in the gym, then blindly follow what might be great or harmful advice. This post is to give those who might want to find real information, but find the research process a little daunting, a very basic/simple/short guide that will hopefully help shed light on whatever issues you face or whatever 'facts' you want to confirm or otherwise. Research skills are invaluable and will help you understand how things work on paper and in the body. Research can help formulate protocols correctly, avoid misinformation, use minimum effective dosages, use the correct compounds etc. This guide is a simple process based on both general research methods and the scientific approach for those who wish to go further.

This guide is not exhaustive, detailed or advanced, so a list of resources and references is included. The guide is intended for the novice to begin researching or those who are experienced but not necessarily academic to go ahead and formulate an evidence/fact/research based experiment or quest for more knowledge.

How to research, steps, example and resources

1. Start with your problem or form a question. For example; On a 19nor cycle, my prolactin goes sky high. Question: Does Deca raise prolactin?
2. Gather basic information and opinions. We are on an internet forum with experienced users, so the first point of call is clearly existing posts where users discuss, prolactin issues, prolactin meds and so on. Hit the blue magnifying glass, gather as much information and opinion as you can. Try to think critically and assess pro's / con's, for's / against, but with eyes that don't necessarily see the answer yet but want more info. You might expand this search to gather bloods posted in the community section where users show high prolactin. (1) Perhaps you wiki prolactin to understand what it is and how it works, as well as symptoms of both high and low prolactin and what meds are used etc. This stage should solidify your question as being legit or make you wonder if there are other factors at play.
3. Create a hypothesis or multiple hypotheses: Example; at this stage you might have read 50 posts and reviewed 20 bloods all showing high prolactin on a deca cycle and cross referenced with other forums. Perhaps the most educated and experienced members / AAS users you know have confirmed this 'truth' Your hypotheses might be: Deca can cause prolactin to raise AND Prolactin meds are needed/should be kept on hand when using Deca
4. Now its time to really SEARCH. To find authoritative information on the question(s) you need a strategy. elements of this include: Question: Does Deca raise prolactin? Keywords, phrases/combined terms. Information sources, types of information and information evaluation. Search tools; Boolean strings/operators. And results of course which may lead further (scientific approach).
   4.1. Keywords/Boolean; prolactin AND high AND (deca OR nandrolone OR Durabolin) - this is a very simple example of a search using specific keywords with optional keywords to broaden the search. If your first search results show a theme of only nandrolone related research and yields results too wide, then remove the OR options for nandrolone to get more specific results (we cant read 18,000 irrelevant articles)
   4.2. Where to search; (a) subjective online sources; eroids, internet forums, TRT experts pages/blogs/forums, (b) Scientific sources; Pubmed (peer reviewed articles, choice of in vitro, in vivo, animal/human studies as well as literature reviews etc.), Google Scholar - as with pub med but watch out for false results leading to internet forums and also be aware of undergrad theses etc. - always look for the full article/full text/pdf, or journal link - like it or not, the abstract is not good enough, because you need to see what was done and what hidden factors are in there for example a study design with deca only users is going to be a better source (most likely) than a study with people who are supp'ing with deca and testosterone and test boosters etc etc. (c) Check references, always look to the references posted which may be more specific to your question and lead you in another direction. (d) Books - Google books can give you excerpts of books, perhaps enough to then check the references and find the original source using the search methods here. (e) If you're getting serious, pay for access to the likes of JSTOR.
   4.3. What to search; Build your keywords carefully, with the academics, broscientists, or bloggers in mind. For example, some scholarly keoriented keywords might include pharmacokinetics, or "clinical efficacy" OR "clinical Response" OR plasma OR serum etc.
5. Thinking critically; Using an open mind, qassess your info and the sources, are they relevant, go beyond the abstract, are they recent data, look at arguments for and against? The more you do this correctly, the more you learn, and the more info you have to address and solve the real problem. From here you can begin to form an argument (present basic research as a lit review with newly formed arguments/newly colated information) or clearly defined hypotheses for an experiment (scientific approach beyond the lit review).
6. Create the story arc to date, leading to the development of the newly formed hypotheses and craft an experiment to test the hypotheses. Think critically about the experiment (single case study (just you!) or multiple actors, Quantitative and Qualitative Research - Objective or Subjective? (observations of 1 actor or survey of thousands) and so on. Example, research shows conflicting info with hundreds of AAS users reporting high prolactin on 19nors, clinical studies correlate prolactin with deca yet research of scholarly articles and case studies does not confirm deca as a causation of prolactin increase. Hypothesis= Deca can cause prolactin increase. Test = 6 week deca only cycle 100 mg 2x per week, single case stury, bloods before, and weekly to show test/estro/prolactin levels as well as other markers.
7. Following the test, collate the information/results, present the evidence ideally with an answer for this individual with recommendations on what comes next (is it a definitive answer or do we need more tests? Do we need to develop the test to include testosterone and measure prolactin again, and will that lead somewhere else? And so on. For example; the cycle shows base levels, then a weekly drop in test, a very small rise in estro by the end and no change in prolactin - discussion, conclusions and future research suggestions are very easy to present with a result like that. If the results are supported for arguments sake by; no scholarly contradictions, and forum bloods that do not show high prl in deca/19nor only cycles, then you can very confident in the results and can focus on other combinations, or drugs or esters etc etc etc.
8. Shout from the treetops; Discover something new? Confirm the status quo? Tell us about it, put it together in a story, following this arc, simplify it as much as possible and share.
9. Citations: Give credit where credit is due such as I have with example (1) above and below. There is nothing worse than plagiarism. Nobody will expect harvard referencing, so just stick a list of links at the end of the article including pdf urls (I always collect links as I go on over time for a specific subject), but if you want to be nice you could number them, and include the numbers during the info presentation for example: Estrogen rises directly cause a rise in prolactin levels (8) and at the end have (8) www......estrogprl.pdf or something similar

A final thought; be wary of only reading abstracts, as publications can use ambiguous language which can lead to misinterpreting results. We should also be wary of only accepting 1 relevant study when trying to prove a point.... think ciritically and look for confirmation/deeper sources of information.
Example; Studies show how to reach steady state for tamoxifen: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9788580
So lets read the abstract and formulate a PCT protocol leveraging a frontloaded tamoxifen dose - faster to steady state = faster recovery, right? Wrong.... Other more relevant studies show that there is no clinical advantage of a frontload:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2069877
http://docslide.net/documents/a-multicentre-trial-to-compare-a-loading-d...
Big difference!

EDIT: helloBrooklyn brings up a great point; in the absence of dedicated AAS-oriented studies, we are often left with BroScience to rely on. This is true and Broscience has a place at the table too, all info sources have a place, we just need real evidence with it!. One of the things I should have mentioned in the post, is to look at relevant sources when AAS-specific info is missing, such as; Women with cancer for estrogen management/exclusion therapy (nolv/ai's), or Anabolics or HGH in HIV/AIDS sufferers - we will get the supraphysiological doses in these types of areas of study that will definitely hold relevance for AAS users, we just need to seek the info out and think a little differently.

Resources/References
Eroids:
(1) https://www.eroids.com/forum/steroids-qa/steroid-cycles/noobs-guide-on-h...
https://www.eroids.com/search
https://www.eroids.com/lab_tests

Scholarly info sources:
Pubmed & other resources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Scholar:scholar.google.com
Google Books: https://books.google.com
JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org

BOOLEAN:
http://www4.uwm.edu/secu/policies_procedures/Search-Tips.pdf
https://www.mcgill.ca/caps/files/caps/gcs2014_linkedinbooleansearchtips.pdf
https://library.uaf.edu/ls101-boolean

Critical Thinking: http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/critical/ct.php

Research:
http://www.statisticshowto.com/research-methods-qualitative-research-and...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40319463?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/research-design/book237357
http://guides.lib.calpoly.edu/c.php?g=496913&p=3401280
http://myathleticlife.com/the-scientific-process
http://libguides.depaul.edu/c.php?g=253687&p=1690373
http://tutorials.library.depaul.edu/e-learning/developing-a-research-que...