The article describes the experience of organizing research work of students studying Russian as a foreign language at a medical university. The example of creating a scientific article shows the prospects of this type of student activity and its interdisciplinary nature. The combination of linguistics and medicine, as well as the involvement of the intermediary language (English), the native language (Hindi, Arabic and others) and Russian as a studied language open up wide opportunities for studying socio-cultural characteristics, help to comprehend the picture of the world through language. Thus, it is proposed to look at a person of a different culture, going beyond national stereotypes and established assessments. This approach contributes to better mutual understanding in communication between «student - student», «student - teacher», interaction between speakers of different languages and cultures. The authors propose a step-by-step plan for preparing students for research activities: choosing a topic, collecting language material, describing the general and specific features of the collected facts, explaining them. When choosing a topic, an important point contributing to greater motivation of students for scientific work is the lack of restrictions on the use of language, professional, ordinary, literary. One of the main didactic values of research is the formation and acquisition of universal competencies among students, including such basic cognitive skills as the ability to analyze, synthesize, categorize, conceptualize.