How to select research topic for PhD?

Having the ability to choose a good research topic for the PhD research is an important skill. We have to choose the topic on our own for that we can follow the below aspects. While we are making decisions on choosing the topics we should follow these steps:

• We should brainstorm for ideas
• We have to choose a topic that will enable you to read and understand the literature
• We should ensure that the topic is manageable and that material is available
• We should make a list of key words
• Topic should be flexible to adapt changes
• We should be able to define our topic as a focused research question
• We have to research and read more about our topic
• We need to formulate a thesis statement

The selection of the topic is not always easy we should know and understand how the accuracy of how the final projection will be. Each and every researcher may have their own style and separate format of selecting the PhD research title.

Use the steps below to guide you through the process of selecting a research topic.

Step 1: Brainstorming the ideas

We should choose a topic that makes us feel interested. We can make us of the following questions for generating ideas for the topic

• Do we have a personal issue, problem or interest on what we would like to know more about?
• Is there an aspect of a class that we are interested in learning more about kindles our thoughts in finding the topics?
• Are we interested in current events?
• Are we interested in health or medicine?
• Are we interested in the Humanities, art, literature, and music?

These are the basic questions that we can ask us to get an idea for selecting the topic for our research work.

Selectively we can write the keywords or terms based on our interest. Analyse whether the selected keywords or terms helps us in choosing the best title for the Research in PhD. We should be aware of not choosing the used topics.

Step 2: Reading general source of information

• We can read many more articles based on our ideas. Reading the whole article summary will give us the broad mind of selecting the topic and review how our topic resembles to the newer idea.
• We can definitely find the common term that is been repeatedly used in the article and makes us to enhance new change in the existing field. Accompanying these keywords will be very useful for our future use.
• We can search in the periodical indexes to know about the current flourishing trend and making sure whether these available trends correlate with our area of interest or not.
• We can also use Google Scholar, research gate, Sodhganga as the basic search engines for gathering the relevant information’s and to develop the research in PhD.

Step 3: Importance of having narrow topic

 We should be able to manage with our topic. A topic will be very difficult to find when it is broad and so we should make it narrow and search further for getting the information. Some common ways to limit a topic are:

• By geographical area Example: What environmental issues are most important in the global regions.
• By culture Example: How does the environment fit into the Navajo world view?
• By time frame Example: What are the most prominent environmental issues of the last 10 years?
• By discipline Example: How does environmental awareness affects our study field?
• By population group Example: What are the effects of air pollution on senior citizens? Remember that a topic may be too difficult to research if it is too lengthy.
• By recent topics – If a topic is quite recent, we can refer the books and recent journals.
• By popular aspect – You will only find very popular articles about some topics such as sports figures and high-profile celebrities and musicians.

Step 4: Keywords listing chooses the better topics.

We can use our selected keywords to track our topics.

• We should look for the best key words that describe our project.
• We should look for the keywords in searching with the search engines while tracking our topics.
• Use the broad and narrow terms using the key concepts to enhance the topic search for the research.
• For the searching of the database and other important information’s for the research we can make use of the listed keywords.

Step 5: We should be flexible

At some cases we may drop the topic that we were researching and somehow we change the topic. This is normal in the research areas among the PhD students. Though we make changes in the topic we should have a clear idea in making research for the new topic and to ensure the stability of research work in PhD.  

Step 6:  Importance of having Keywords

We can make use of the keyword to search in the article database or in various search engines. At most of the times the question that we have will help us to answer more for our research work that all happens only when we answer to our questions. By reading more and more data we can form a set of keywords that make more sense and with this key note we can choose a desired topic based on our area of interest for our PhD research.