This is a good starting point but its not exhaustive by any means...
## How to find a good research topic?
It’s best to familiarize yourself with a discipline or topic as broadly as possible by looking beyond academia
Be enthusiastic, but not unrealistic. For example, you might be tempted to throw yourself into finding out to what extent an entire economy has become circular, but it may already be challenging and tricky enough to find out which building materials are being recycled in the construction sector, and in what ways.
Be open-minded but beware of cul-de-sacs. You should always find out first whether enough is known about a topic already, or you might find yourself wasting a lot of time on it.
Be creative but stay close to the assignment. This starts with the topic itself; if one learning objective of the assignment is to carry out a survey, it isn’t helpful to choose a topic for which you need to find respondents on the other side of the world. One place where you can look for inspiration is current events.
Although professors and lecturers tend to be extremely busy, they are often enthusiastic about motivated and smart students who are interested in their research field. You do need to approach them with focused questions, though, and not just general talk such as: ‘Do you know of a good topic for me?’ In many cases, a good starting point is the scholar themselves. Do a search on them in a search engine, take a look at their university web page, read recent publications,
In most university towns, you’ll come across organizations that hold regular lectures, debates, and thematic evenings, often in partnership with or organized by university lecturers and professors. If you’re interested in transdisciplinary research where academic knowledge and practical knowledge come together, this is certainly a useful place to start your search.
If you want to do interdisciplinary research, it is essential to understand and work with concepts and theories from different research fields, so that you are able to draw links between them (see Menken and Keestra (2016) on why theory is important for this). With an eye to your ‘interdisciplinary’ academic training, it is therefore a good idea to start your first steps in research with concepts and theories.
Although texts in different academic disciplines can differ significantly in terms of structure, form, and length, almost all academic articles (research articles and literature reports) share a number of characteristics:
They are published in scholarly journals with expert editorial boards
These journals are peer-reviewed
These articles are written by authors who have no direct commercial or political interest in the topic on which they are writing
There are also non-academic research reports such as UN reports, data from statistics institutes, and government reports. Although these are not, strictly speaking, peer-reviewed, the reliability of these sources means that their contents can be assumed to be valid
You can usually include grey literature in your research bibliography, but if you’re not sure, you can ask your lecturer or supervisor whether the source you’ve found meets the requirements.
Google and Wikipedia are unreliable: the former due to its commercial interests, the latter because anyone, in principle, can adjust the information and few checks are made on the content.
disciplinary and interdisciplinary search machines with extensive search functions for specialized databases, such as the Web of Science, Pubmed, Science Direct, and Scopus
Search methods
All of these search engines allow you to search for scholarly sources in different ways. You can search by topic, author, year of publication, and journal name. Some tips for searching for literature:
1. Use a combination of search terms that accurately describes your topic.
2. You should use mainly English search terms, given that English is the main language of communication in academia.
3. Try multiple search terms to unearth the sources you need.
a. Ensure that you know a number of synonyms for your main topic
b. Use the search engine’s thesaurus function (if available) to map out related concepts.
During your search, it is advisable to keep track of the keywords and search combinations you use. This will allow you to check for blind spots in your search strategy, and you can get feedback on improving the search combinations. Some search engines automatically keep a record of this.
Exploratory reading
How do you make a selection from the enormous number of articles that are often available on a topic? Keep the following four questions in mind, and use them to guide your literature review:
■■ What is already known about my topic and in which discipline is the topic discussed?
■■ Which theories and concepts are used and discussed within the scope of my topic, and how are they defined?
■■ How is my topic researched and what different research methods are there?
■■ Which questions remain unanswered and what has yet to be researched?
Run through the titles, abstracts, and keywords of the articles at the top of your list and work out which ideas (concepts) keep coming back.
Next, use the abstract to figure out what these concepts mean, and also try to see whether they are connected and whether this differs for each study.
If you are unable to work out what the concepts mean, based on the context, don’t hesitate to use dictionaries or search engines.
Make a list of the concepts that occur most frequently in these texts and try to draw links between them.
A good way to do this is to use a concept map, which sets out the links between the concepts in a visual way.
All being well, by now you will have found a list of articles and used them to identify several concepts and theories. From these, try to select the theories and concepts that you want to explore further. Selecting at this stage will help you to frame and focus your research.
The next step is to discover to what extent these articles deal with these concepts and theories in similar or different ways, and how combining these concepts and theories leads to different outcomes. In order to do this, you will need to read more thoroughly and make a detailed record of what you’ve learned.
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