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Social work has always had a profound political function of structuring society. Research has focused extensively on social work, both as a field of study of the “social” and as an “institutional” field, both of which need to be supported. This text examines the best way to consider this research to promote it, drawing from the author’s experience in France, based on the dichotomy between research “on” and research “in” social work, and, in Switzerland, based on the continuity of “Applied Research and Development” (AR&D) that oversees the laboratories of the Universities of Applied Sciences. On the basis of the Frascati Manual, this text advocates for a systematization of a standardized triptych of research (fundamental, applied, experimental) on a global scale, so that social work can draw on all these complementary approaches. This would allow social work to have a well-defined and standardized scientific agenda, serving its highly political purpose.