The phrase 'start a research' is correct and usable in written English.
It is often used as an imperative (an action statement) to suggest that someone should take the initiative to begin researching a particular topic. Example: In order to understand the issue better, let's start a research on the current economic situation.
He convinced Gates to start a research group in 1991, which has since grown to 200 researchers and includes sister laboratories in the U.K., and in China.
Or start a research group devoted to energy independence, an issue about which he is obsessed.
Three years later, he moved to the University of California, San Francisco, to help start a research program in physiology.
Scraps between African-American and Somali girls prompted her to start a research project demonstrating to them that their ancestors all came from roughly the same place.
Harvey and Annette Whittemore were not the first to start a research foundation out of desperation to find answers for an incurable disease.
And Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank and Japan's richest man, said last month that he would donate about $12 million to start a research foundation for renewable energy.
He also practiced law, and with his wife he started a research library dedicated to motor sports in Watkins Glen.
I was also an assistant for an ophthalmologist who started a research program at what is now the N.Y.U.
An adviser was essential to starting a research career, but no one else at his university worked on amphibians.
But after he earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. and started a research career in 1984 at Cornell University, he became fascinated with the biotechnology revolution.
He moved to Paris after four years in the Navy; there he started a research company and founded The Parnassus Review, a literary magazine.
