I’m actively engaging in several Facebook and LinkedIn groups for early career researchers and PhDs, and I noted a worrying trend. I noted that one of the most common questions I get is how do you actually get ideas for your research and develop a research title. If you want to learn about the key steps to develop your thesis statement or generate proposal ideas, have a look at my 5-step framework to generate research ideas. 

I observed recently that people actually ask others to provide a thesis title or research title for them. You may have asked this question yourself. I understand this may be a good brainstorming exercise, but as an experienced academic, I don’t really think that’s a good idea. So let me explain my point of view in this article. 

By the way – do you want advice or want to discuss your research experience with other researchers? Join our Facebook group today!

Why you SHOULD NOT ask for research title recommendations on Facebook? 

As a researcher, you’re responsible for delivering your own research. Would you agree? If yes, then if you ask someone else a research topic, then this is not really your own research, isn’t it? 

I know it’s harsh, but if you’re at the early stage of your research, you probably don’t think about the end of your journey. But the key to a successful research programme is knowing the rationale for your thesis statement. This is because you will need to justify it in your thesis and during your viva examination. This also applies to justifying the approach you take to deliver this project, as idea generation is strongly linked to how you will deliver your research project. If you haven’t come up with your research topic, it may be difficult to do so.

Another reason for not using social media and forums to ask for research titles is the fact that other researchers can also see these discussions and may use the same topic as the main idea for the research.

But it is easy for experienced academics to produce good research title…

I get this a lot – people say that it’s easy for me to say that you need to come up with your own research ideas, as I’ve got all this experience. And this makes me a bit frustrated as an academic myself. Why? Well, as with every skill, I needed to develop it myself, and I wasn’t exceptionally good at it at the beginning of my PhD. I know it is difficult to come up with new research ideas, as I was there myself. I struggled to find my way through the enormous volume of papers available in my research area. I won’t even mention how I struggled with paper writing here. 

But as with everything you do, you need to practice. As you train your idea generation skills, actually start thinking in a way that answers the research questions, thinking whether your research idea is valid for pursuing as a research paper, coming up with research titles will become easier and easier. 

How to start producing good research titles? 

Let me tell you how do I come up with research ideas. That’s the skill that I’ve started mastering during my PhD.

At the beginning of my PhD, I was like you – I didn’t have many ideas. I also thought my ideas were not worth pursuing because I didn’t have much experience, and I didn’t have much understanding of my research field. I was told by one of my supervisors that to be truly successful in my academic career, I really have to know the research field inside out.

So what does that mean to you?

To know your research field, you need to know what’s going on, what are challenges to be solved, what are discussions other researchers in your field are having. That’s why you really have to read a lot. And that’s what I’ve started doing at the early stage of my PhD. I’ve started reading papers, documents, white papers, you name it. I’ve been kind of reading all information I could find.

But I’ve soon realised that just reading won’t give me the results I want. You can read something, but then you actually forget what you read. I think you can relate to this. Therefore, I decided to actually write a review paper. I know review papers have some bad reputation because many people think they can be of lower value than research papers, and they may not contribute that much to the research area because they contain already published data.

But I found that doing the literature review and writing research papers motivated me to learn more about my research field in a more structured way.

Here’s the trick – I didn’t just want to write a review paper for the standard journal with a reasonable impact factor. I decided that I was going to write the best review paper in my research field, and I was going to publish it in the best journal. When I told that to my supervisors, they were a bit sceptical. You don’t have much experience, you won’t succeed in this you, you’ll be rejected. I guess you can relate to this. It’s difficult to hear something like this. 

But I’ve never given up hope, and I’ve started doing this, I’ve started compiling the data, I’ve started reading even more papers. Having read extensively, I’ve narrowed down the structure for my review paper and clarified the contribution it will make. At the end of the day, I’ve managed to write one of the best review papers in my research area, which was published in Energy and Environmental Science. So that’s a kind of equivalent journal to Science in the energy area with a current impact factor of 38. So you can see it’s a very important journal in my research area.

However, it’s not just the fact that I got published in that prestigious journal that’s important. What’s really important is the fact that I gained an understanding of the technology that I was researching at the level that no one else had in my research field. That gave me an edge over other people in my research field because I knew the nitty-gritty and the smallest details about the technology and was able to systematically identify challenges that still need to be addressed. I knew the current discussions and I knew what needed to be done to actually improve the technology. New research ideas were easy to generate having this kind of understanding. 

As you can see, coming up with research ideas, and subsequently, research titles actually starts with the understanding of your research field. Because only then you know the challenges that need to be addressed, solving which can change your field forever. Therefore, once you do your literature review, you should be able to actually understand those challenges in your research area. And you see that reading, doing research, writing it down is important. This is because you formulate the research in your own words, as that’s how your brain processes thoughts, ideas and concepts.

The more you review and reflect, the easier identifying the gaps in the literature and the current understanding of our research field will become. This will pave the way to generating your own ideas.

From a literature review to a good research title

Now you should realise that your research journey would start with reporting on what has already been done in your research field. Once you build up enough understanding of your research field, you’ll start seeing some gaps that will help you come up with your new research ideas and research titles.

And that is what helped me produce 9 papers during my PhD itself.

When I was working on my review paper, I’ve noted so many potential research avenues that I could pursue in my PhD and I thought – well, why don’t I just write down all these ideas so that I can use them later. And that’s exactly what I did. Initially, I noted the ideas down in the notebook, but now I use spreadsheet spreadsheets to keep track of my research ideas.

In that spreadsheet, I actually write down the research question to be addressed, I might include some of my thoughts about how I would approach the research and analysis, and more importantly, I write down what I think the novelty of my work will be. It’s also useful to keep track of the references that can help you support your hypothesis.

The last item is particularly important because whenever you write a review paper or a research paper, you do have to discuss why it is novel and what is the contribution of that research. So, there is no point in actually starting doing research on an idea if it cannot justify its potential novelty. So just something to think about before you actually start writing or doing your work.

Never throw a good research title away

I have accumulated quite a large spreadsheet with research ideas and potential research titles for scholarly papers over years of doing research. Whenever I’ve some spare time to do my research or need proposal ideas, then I actually go through my spreadsheet to check if I can use something I’ve already researched. By doing so, you’ll never need to ask others to provide research titles for your work.

I highly encourage you to accumulate as many research ideas as you can get your work. Then, you can potentially select the most exciting ideas you can pursue during your research. And that brings me to the last but important point. You do need to learn how to efficiently prioritise research ideas. You need to find a way to judge which research idea aligns with your current project, which research idea is something that you would like to pursue right now. You can consider many criteria for doing so, such as alignment with overall programme scope, relevance to funding call, or the fact that someone else can be pursuing a similar idea.

Conclusions

I hope this article encouraged you to stop asking people on forums and social media, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, to give you research topics. I trust that you will now start generating your own research ideas and become a successful academic in your research field. Remember to keep track of any research idea that you come up with so that you can reuse it later. 

Do you have your own process for coming up with research ideas? Or maybe you have a specific way you use to generate a research title. Please share it in the comments!