Strategic-basic research refers to basic research conducted in strategically selected areas expected to be of social benefit. Recent literature on the processes of basic research and its linkages to applied research has not be widely discussed in relation to agricultural research. It is proposed that the literature may have important implications for the question of the optimal allocation of research resources between strategic-basic and applied research. The linkages are reviewed and combined into a framework for considering the allocation question. An illustrative numerical model based on this framework suggests that only a small number of the model's parameters substantially affect the optimal level of basic research, and that it is not important to identify the optimal solution very precisely, since the benefit function is extremely flat for a wide region around the optimum.