In Dominions, all non-Holy spells are organized into one of seven schools of magic. Where a spell's path represents the power source, the school a spell belongs to ostensibly represents the methods used to manipulate that power. In order for their mages to cast more advanced spells and forge more powerful magic items, the player has to invest research into these schools. Each school has nine levels of research.

The order in which these schools are researched is decided through the Research Screen, which can be accessed by pressing F5 in-game. Simply left-click on the name of a school to queue up one level of research into that school. Any research points left over after the queue is finished will be assigned to an unfinished school, starting from the top of the Research Screen.

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Only commanders with the research ability are capable of contributing to their nation's research. A unit with the research ability will have a piles of books icon on their ability bar, next to their magic paths, with a number indicating how many points they contribute to the pool. Troops cannot research.

By default, units require some amount of magic paths in order to be able to research. The higher a mage's magic paths, the more research points they can contribute. However, there are several factors that might change how much a unit contributes.

First of all, some units have the "Adept Researcher" or "Inept Researcher" abilities, indicated with a single book on their ability bar (with a red X for inept). These abilities are a straight buff or penalty, respectively, to how many research points the unit generates. The independent, recruitable Wolf Tribe Shamans are an example of an inept researcher; the Great Sage pretender is an example of an adept researcher.

Secondly, the scales of the province the unit is researching in will have an effect. Each point of Magic scales will add a research point to each researcher in that province. Likewise, each point of Drain scales will reduce research. Some units, most notably the Smiths of MA Ulm, are immune to this research penalty.

There also exist "Inspiring Researchers" - these commanders will increase the research points of all other mages in the province, making them especially powerful when stationed in research hubs such as your capital. For example, an Inspiring Researcher +1 in a province with 25 other mages will be adding +25 research points to your pool, the equivalent of quite a few extra mages. Often this ability is attached to a pretender - for example, the Great Sage is also an inspiring researcher.

Lastly, you can also forge or find magical items that increase research points. There are several of these scattered throughout the different paths, the non legendary are the 5 Owl Quill, the 5 Imp Familiar, the 10 Skull Mentor, and the 5 Lightless Lantern.

Each nation begins the game with an amount of RP based on its pretender's magic/drain scale. This free RP is not influenced by the age the game is set in and cannot be disabled.

If the game is using the "random start research" option (the default), the RP is allocated to random schools in 50-RP parcels. The default total is 150 RP; each level of magic adds 50 more RP and each level of drain subtracts 50 RP.

If the game is not using random start research, the RP is divided evenly between each school. Due to rounding, the total amount of RP will be slightly different from a random start research game:

The amount of research points that must be invested in a school in order to reach each level is dependent on the game's settings. Most multiplayer games use the standard research difficulty setting: