I find it's best to think of and also communicate the research phase as stage of the project itself with a report at the end as a deliverable.

At the status meeting, talk about the stages you've accomplished so far ("I've completed scoping, looked at these three third-party components, etc").

When the research stage is done, write up a research report with what you did and the findings and present it to the team. This gives the rest of the team visibility into what you're doing. It's also very helpful months later when you question "why did we pick Foo?" because you can refer back and know exactly why you did.