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.
