Now you are positioned to carry out your research. As you do, it’s important to:

1) keep careful notes and records of your research and how it was done (and save them securely for 5 years). It is more common now for journals to request further information on the research during peer review, and for other scientists who read the published article to request information (see, for example, the instructions of the journal PLOS ONE on this);

2) remember to observe confidentiality if you are working with human subjects, not only in the final result but also in the research procedures and how the records are kept and saved—and keep notes that can help you account for this later if needed; and

3) if there are co-authors involved, have a clear, written agreement from the beginning of who the co-authors are, the role of each of them in the overall work, and the order in which they will be listed, along with who is the corresponding author.

Another word about research methods and methods of analysis and display of the data:  it's essential that they be up-to-date and be the most appropriate ones for what you are doing, not just any that seem to fit easily (see the COPE Standards for further comments on this). Especially if you are in humanities and social sciences, be very clear about the choices you are making and that they are the most appropriate ones, and that you are (for example) prepared to carry out the most meaningful statistical analysis of the data.  Nowadays, most articles are based on original research, and most analysis, especially in the social sciences, involves quantitative methods (establishing something that can be measured and then evaluated for statistical significance); even qualitative approaches (for example, those often used in articles based on interviews of informants) have an underlying methodology.  In most fields and journals, to be publishable, your article must avoid being "descriptive," that is, it cannot not just talk about some of the findings and how they seemed, rather it must offer a systematic analysis.