The article deals with the specifics of document analysis as a method of document research. It is known that philosophical methodology supports the method of teaching, but none of the existing methodologies can offer an absolute cognitive toolkit. Each of them becomes productive within a specific field of knowledge, goals and objectives of the study. Relying on general science, interdisciplinary methods, each science, the discipline develops and applies its own methods, or makes adjustments to those that used other sciences. Scientific discipline of documentation, as a young science, requires further development of the corresponding methodology of document research. The purpose of the article is to draw the attention of documentalist to the developed socio-humanities sciences, especially sociology, the basic requirements and rules for the application of methods of documents analysis, namely: the classical, or traditional and formalized method, content-analysis. This will allow, if not avoid, to take into account possible mistakes in documentary research when collecting and interpreting the resulting empirical material. It is determined that in the process of formation and development of the cycle of documentary disciplines, an arsenal of their research methods should become more and more diverse. This will be facilitated by the close link between document science and related academic disciplines. That is precisely what determines the further development and improvement of its scientific toolkit. The need to define «document-based methods» arises when practical document-research activity is considered as a kind of scientific and cognitive activity. From our point of view, in addition to the methods of historical source studies, the most approaching documentary methods, which are widely used in research, are qualitative and quantitative methods for analyzing documents used by sociologists and journalists, in particular, content analysis. Knowledge about the advantages and disadvantages of these methods will enhance the quality of document research

document; scientific discipline of documentation; documentary sources of information; methodology for scientific research; qualitative method of document analysis; content analysis