Do you want to select a research topic for your thesis or dissertation, but you don’t really know how and where to start looking?

Then you’ve stumbled upon the perfect article here.

Because in the next few minutes, I’m going to tell you 3 steps I would take if I were looking for a research topic for my thesis, dissertation, or paper.

If you follow these 3 steps, you will not only get rid of your doubts and indecisiveness – no, after this exercise you can already write the email to potential supervisors and submit them a proposal they can’t refuse.

#1 Supervisor Screening

The first suggestion I’d like to make is perhaps a bit unconventional. But if you want to get an outstanding grade AND have fun with your thesis, here’s what I would do if I were you.

Don’t put the potential content of your research at the beginning of your topic identification process, but rather a person.

Why?

Well, think about it. If you find a supervisor with whom you get along great, how does that affect you?

The mentoring conversations are informal and fun. A person with whom you are on the same wavelength is likely to be enthusiastic about the same topics as you are.

The person will offer to help you more and more often if they like you. Hence, the likelihood that you’ll get a bad grade drops precipitously. So, the first step on how to select a research topic is to identify your preferred supervisor. In doing so, you can look at these criteria:

How good was your experience with him or her during your studies?
What topics does this person advertise on their website?
Is this person actively doing research, i.e. can you find recent publications on their website? On which topics?
Is this person an experienced professor or research assistant (PhD student, post-doc)?

Your favorite lecturer is not your favorite lecturer because he or she has nice hair. Most of the time, your enthusiasm for their course comes through the topics anyway. Now write down your 3 favorite topics you found while researching this person.

If you are studying at a university, research assistants and post-docs can also supervise your work. Always prefer these people over a professor. For three reasons:

They have to do their own research (PhD students) or prove themselves with publications (post-docs).
The motivation of this person to use a thesis for their research is much higher
A bad thesis serves this person nothing at all; therefore the supervision becomes all the better

Professors who have hung up their research boots don’t care if your thesis is good or bad.

#2 Read, read, read

When it comes to a selecting a research topic, reading is by far the biggest lever you can apply. You can think back and forth as much as you want – it’s all wasted time. Just don’t think about a possible topic at all, but read into the 3 topics from step 1 as much as you can allow yourself.

Slowly approach the topic of your research

Start with light fare to get a gentle introduction: YouTube, popular science articles or documentaries. This usually doesn’t hurt that much and is fun.

Then you dare to tackle the scientific literature. Here, the following principle applies to finding a topic:

For now, topicality is more important than the basics.

If one of your 3 topics is e-learning, then knowing the history and roots of e-learning will not help you in finding a topic. It is more important to know how the topic has been researched in the last 1-3 years and which acute questions arise in this area.

So, when searching for reading material, be sure to use literature databases where you can find journal articles and conference proceedings.

The Special Issue Hack

One trick to select your research topic lies in so-called “special issues”. These are calls for papers from scientific journals that want research on specific topics. Here, smart people (the editors) have thought about what research questions would be really important right now. So they have practically already done the work for you! In addition, you will find in such calls even a small bibliography with reading recommendations. So you get suggestions for topics as if served on a silver platter. Isn’t that practical?

You can find these calls for papers on the websites of the journals. If you don’t know which journals are relevant for your topic, go back to the publication list of your potential supervisor from step 1 and write down the journals in which he or she has already published.

#3 Combination and Inquiry

To avoid choosing the exact same topic that has already been researched by your supervisor, you need to add a little original twist to your research topic. If you didn’t find what you were looking for in the calls for papers, or if people in your discipline tend to only research books, try the following:

Combine the topic you’re most interested in with a current phenomenon, technology, or theory.

The topic you finally choose should not only be interesting, but also relevant. And you achieve relevance by addressing a research problem.

If you now combine your favorite topic with a second component, in most cases the result is such a dynamic topic that a relevant research problem can easily be derived from it. Here are a few examples:

E-learning + AI
Enterprise + Digital Nomadism
School education + Virtual Reality
Democracy + Bitcoin
Cryptocurrencies + Climate Change
E-mobility + 3-D printing
Retirement + Social Media

I think you see the pattern. So now think about what research problem arises from such a combination and how you might approach this problem methodologically. Qualitatively? Quantitative? With literature work?

The next step on how to select a research topic would be to derive a research question. For this, you take your chosen topics or some aspects of it and take those as variables. Then you simply ask for the relationship between the two. For example:

How does Virtual Reality affect the Cognitive Load of school children between the ages 12-15?

Additionally, I’ve added a theory to the mix. I explain how and why you should do this in my tutorial on how to develop a research question.

Conclusion

Be prepared for presenting a preliminary research question in your inquiry to your potential supervisor. Present him or her with a topic for your research that fits in with her own research, has an original and current twist, and is fun for both of you.

This way, you’re guaranteed to open doors with your request and lay a fantastic foundation for your research.