How to find a Research Topic

Find a research gap
Think about your future career goal
Review past dissertations of your university
- What types of topics did they have?
- How did they turn the topics into research questions?
- How justified were they?
Nieche down on specific topics in your interest areas
Get into existing Research
- Snowball existing papers
- Top 20-30 articles in the field will give you a good overview
- Skim papers: How to read Research Papers
Find potential research topics
- look for Future Work section in your papers
- look into existing research and look at it from a different context where it’s not as researched
- Freestyle brainstorming and mindmapping
Evaluate your list of potential topics. Score each topic on
- originality, importance, if it has a good literature base,
- if you can get access to the data, if you have access to resources,
- if you are able to collect the data
- if you are able to analyse the data
- how excited am I about the topic?
- how valuable is it for my career?
Develop your top 3 topics into 3 elevator pitches
- 1S explain big picture
- 1S explain why its original
- 1S explain why its important
- 1S how you will do the research

Fabian Untermoser