How To Choose A Research Topic | Best Criteria For A Research Topic | Selection Of A Research Topic

If you are searching for a new research topic for your Ph.D work, dissertation, or for any project and are unable to find a new one.

You are here on the right track because we are here to prove to you a few steps of the research topic selection process and write this article to help you all who are planning to do research for their Ph.D., or who want to present a research paper at any conference, seminar, symposium, congress, etc.,

This article helps you all who are researching for unique research topics and for those who are in their final year of their master’s degree or new to a PhD degree and are looking forward to doing their dissertation and need a topic for that.

I have more than 12 years of research experience and have worked on many research projects and labs. We always use these strategies and steps for topic selection so that our research papers are concise.

The most challenging part of any research is choosing a research topic because it is the basic starting point of the study. If you don’t choose the right topic during your research, the chances are that you might end up leaving the research altogether.

I must realize that most Ph.D. students are found incorrect during their research topic selection and just before the end of their Ph.D. degree, they find that their guides have completely rejected the topic and they are choosing another topic that is more appropriate or different.

Read: Reasons For The Rejection Of A Research Paper

If you have not chosen a specific appropriate research topic, you might leave the research because you don’t know where to go, what to do, or how to justify the topic.

I’m going to give you a step-by-step guide that is going to help you choose a research topic very easily and start with your research.

Let’s start with some important things that you must remember when you decide to choose a research topic. If you follow these steps before starting your research, you can possibly arrive at the result of choosing a research topic that is good and creating a good atmosphere in your research.

Read: How To Write Best Abstract for Conference and Research Paper

Area of Interest for Research topic

You ought to remember the fact that the research topic should be in your area of interest. There are lots of students who ask for suggestions regarding the selection of their research topic and sometimes wonder if it is possible to say that the prerequisite for a topic selection is more operational and progressive, etc., but my answer to you is to read literature, literature, literature…….

Well-read the literature and come up with your topic because literature is the backbone of research and only the technique will help you find your area of research without any help.

Anyway, let’s explain with an example: if you can select a life partner for me, you will never do that right because you know that a life partner cannot be selected by anybody. You need to know your likes, dislikes, and compatibility with a person, and only then can you decide whom to marry.

The same thing exists in the case of choosing a research topic. The topic is very individualistic. You need to see your topic. You need to choose a topic that appeals to you.

So remember that if you’re not happy, you won’t learn. The first important factor in any field of study is your interest area, which is determined after a literature review or background study.

The background study for research topic selection

The next significant thing you must do to finalize your research topic is a background study or review of the literature. The first important thing that you need to understand here is that you need to look into the ocean of literature or search for vast literature besides your interest area.

For example, you can do your research on any topic of science, for example, diversity studies, and if you are interested in knowing more about genetic, molecular, and species diversity, etc., in that case, take a look based on diversity and its variation.

For that, you can take up all the books and literature related to different types of diversity in which that study was conducted and then do a comparative study.

That would be a great thing for you, and you can find out a particular area in which you can do research, maybe molecular diversity or maybe others.

By knowing your interest area, you can know what you would like to invest in your next three years and how to finish your research work on time.

The initial research topic was a quest for self-discovery, a comparative study of plant genetic diversity, and you can see how I was able to figure out the topic by better understanding my interest area.

So, similarly, you can also know your interest area and then figure out what particular topic you would like to research. After knowing your interest area, the next important thing that you must do to finalize your research aim is to identify your research methodology

Research Aim for a research topic

The aim of the research, so-called “what do you think?” is the aim of the research. It is either to find out some new facts or to revisit the existing facts and look at them to see if they’re still valid today. The aim of the research is to add something new to the existing frame of knowledge.

If you are just copy-pasting (plagiarism text) from already done research, it will not be called research because you are not adding anything new to the existing body of knowledge on that particular topic.

Read: How To Write A Plagiarism-Free Research Paper or Thesis

For example, when you decide to do research on a topic, you should first look at what works have already been done in that field and look at their works from different angles that have yet to be explored, or you can read previous research papers of scholars who have done some work in that field where you will be working and find out the research gap that you will be working on.

Research gap in previous research

A research gap is an area that was left unexplored in the previous research, and from that particular research gap, you will get your topic and make it a habit.

Before choosing a research topic, you go through different articles, journals, and existing research papers and then figure out the research gap finally, you take up either an unexplored area or a partially unexplored area.

Your research also remembers that this background study or literature review is going to help you a lot when you are writing your synopsis and final thesis to justify your topic and indicate the previous works that have been carried out on the same topic.

Literature is an important part of the research, and by reading bulk literature, you can easily find out the research gaps The next important step is the research limit.

Research Limit in research

Now, what do you mean by limiting your research? If you take up a very bulky topic, for example, exploring the biodiversity of the Himalayas region in India, it seems to be a very simple and very sweet research topic, but you cannot understand how bulky this topic is.

There have been more than 1000 different plants and animals present in the Himalayan, which comprises millions of species, so how can you possibly present all of this in a research paper or in a Ph.D. thesis, which is restricted to 250 pages?

Now, it’s clear that you should avoid a very bulky topic, and if you choose such a topic for your research, then your research is going to be never-ending research. My suggestion is to limit your research, avoid the big research areas, and learn how you can make this journey of Ph.D. or research a lot easier.

Wrapping Up

This is all about this article and hopes these tips on research topic selection and information will help you in your literature search and research discovery before publishing in a suitable research journal.

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