Top 5 tips for Choosing a Research Topic

Deciding what to write a research assignment about can be a daunting prospect. You want it to be interesting for sure. But you don’t want to get yourself too deeply entrenched in a project that could turn out to be impossible in terms of sourcing material and creating original perspective. That decision is even more overwhelming if this is a thesis, or dissertation, that will be your life’s work for the next few years. These tips should help to make the decision easier.

1. Write what you know. This is not to say you shouldn’t do any research but rather, that you should choose a topic that has interested you in the past. Make it a topic that you will be able to elaborate upon with future research.
2. See what’s out there on the topic. While you want to write something interesting and original you will be banging your head against a wall, and putting in a lot of extra hours, working on projects for which there isn’t much information. The mating habits of the tsk tsk fly for example. So choose a topic that will inspire interest but don’t make it so far out there that you have to travel to remote Borneo to find out about it.
3. Pay attention to available detail. It is fair to say that the compelling aspects of a dissertation are in the details and it is here that your true efforts will be reflected. Choose a topic that can take some deep and interesting twists and turns. If there is surprise and wonder in the topic detail, that is even better.
4. Choose a defensible topic.  You may have some great ideas but if they won’t hold up to scrutiny you will struggle to answer the counter-arguments.
5. Find out what people are funding. You may want to take this idea further in the future and knowing that there is money for the topic in graduate research may make the topic more appealing.