A research university or a research-intensive university is a university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. They are "the key sites of knowledge production", along with "intergenerational knowledge transfer and the certification of new knowledge" through the awarding of doctoral degrees, and continue to be "the very center of scientific productivity". They can be public or private, and often have well-known brand names.

Undergraduate courses at many research universities are often academic rather than vocational and may not prepare students for particular careers, but many employers value degrees from research universities because they teach fundamental life skills such as critical thinking. Globally, research universities are overwhelmingly public institutions, while some countries like the United States and Japan also have well-known private research institutions.

Institutions of higher education that are not research universities or do not aspire to that designation, such as liberal arts colleges, instead place more emphasis on student instruction or other aspects of tertiary education, whereas research university faculty members, in contrast, are under more pressure to publish or perish.

The concept of the research university first arose in early 19th-century Prussia in Germany, where Wilhelm von Humboldt championed his vision of Einheit von Lehre und Forschung (the unity of teaching and research), as a means of producing an education that focused on the main areas of knowledge, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, rather than on the previous goals of the university education, which was to develop an understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Roger L. Geiger, "the leading historian of the American research university," has argued that "the model for the American research university was established by five of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia); five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California); and five private institutions conceived from their inception as research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago)." The American research university first emerged in the late 19th century, when these fifteen institutions began to graft graduate programs derived from the German model onto undergraduate programs derived from the British model. At Johns Hopkins, president Daniel Coit Gilman led the development of the American research university by setting high standards for recruiting faculty and admitting students, and insisting that faculty members had to commit to both teaching and research.

Research universities were essential to the establishment of American hegemony by the end of the 20th century. Most importantly, Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, and Princeton (along with Birmingham and Cambridge in the UK) directly participated in the creation of the first nuclear weapons (the Manhattan Project). Besides that, Columbia and Harvard were instrumental in the early development of the American film industry (Hollywood), MIT and Stanford were leaders in building the American military–industrial complex and developing artificial intelligence, and Berkeley and Stanford played a central role in the development of Silicon Valley. The "most prestigious group of research universities" in the United States is the Association of American Universities.

Since the 1960s, American research universities, especially the leading American public research university system, the University of California, have served as models for research universities around the world. Having one or more universities based on the American model (including the use of English as a lingua franca) is a badge of "social progress and modernity" for the contemporary nation-state.

The Americans' continued dominance into the early 21st century has forced their European counterparts to confront the urgent need for reform to avoid "declining into an advanced form of feeder colleges for the best American universities." During that same timeframe, several wealthy petrostates in the Persian Gulf region subsidized the creation of local branches of American universities. When that approach proved insufficient to establish indigenous research and startup ecosystems (to support the planned long-term diversification of their economies away from petroleum), they started to build their own research universities from the ground up by recruiting Western-trained faculty and staff.