The pronunciation of “research” as a noun is one of my Pet Peeves, like “reaching a crescendo” and the rampant ascending cadence.

As a verb, a stress on the second syllable seems standard; more variable is the pronunciation of the noun. I was never aware of the stress on the first syllable (with a long “ee”) until the 1990s; now I often find myself bombarded by it on the radio.

Both forms may have been around for a long time, but I’m not sure the current state of play is entirely random. In the UK it seems to be largely generational—the first-syllable stress perhaps another of those more recent influences from the good ol’ US of A. Amongst all the research [gritted teeth] on stress patterning, someone must have tabulated this by age, period, region, and perhaps by class and even gender (“broken down by age and sex“, like Keith Richards). zzzzz…

So I suspect it’s just an index of my irrational elderly snobbery. For me, absurdly, the stress on the first syllable seems to suggest that the speaker is a callow upstart. The choice seems to distinguish serious study from messing around on the internet; Some Might Say that reSEARCH is what I used to do, while REsearch is what I do now… Hoisted with my own petard—whatever that is.

See also You say potato, Signoffs and other cross-pond drôlerie, To go: a parallel text, Momentarily, and This and that.