Coming Up with Research Topics (Part 2)

Sometimes, rather than starting from scratch with a brand new question and method, you can look at work that other researchers have done and then extend or change that work in your own research. Perhaps the original study only examined members of the white-collar workforce -- in this case, you could do the same study but with a blue-collar workforce. Perhaps a prior study examined productivity in terms of profits, but you think that productivity would be better measured by the amount of actual work achieved. Sometimes, too, new technology can permit a more complete view of behavior. For example, with the advent of social networking websites, it may be possible to document social behavior in a way previously not possible.

Issac Newton once said, "If I have seen a little farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." What he meant by this statement is that he was able to achieve much of what he did because he benefited from the discoveries and achievements of previous thinkers. You may benefit in this same way by reading prior research and studying the work of other scientists. Since you are Penn State students studying online, you may or may not be within a reasonable distance of a Penn State library. If you are fortunate enough to be near a university library, I recommend looking in their computerized catalog for books related to your topic. Still, many college and university libraries are more than adequate for your purposes, and perhaps other libraries as well, so go ahead and do some searches for books about your topic.

On the other hand, as students of Penn State, you benefit from being able to access an enormous number of scholarly journals and publications. We will have an exercise on how to do this search, but if you want to check it out, go ahead and look for the library page on the Penn State website. When you find an article that you might want to read, it will often (if not always) be accompanied by a brief summary called an abstract. This concise summary will give you a rough idea of what the article is about, so you can decide if you want to read the actual article. In no way should the abstract be treated as a substitute for reading the article, but it is a useful tool to help decide which articles you actually want and need to read.

A very useful way to find articles is to find one article about your topic, then look at the references section of that article. Each article will typically reference at least ten other articles that are relevant to its topic, and as such you may be able to quickly find a large number of good articles for your topic. Additionally, most article search engines allow you to look at who else has cited a given article, so you can look both at what those authors cited (their references) and who has cited them.

I'd like to revisit the idea of talking to professors and instructors about your research ideas. This can be a delicate matter, as professors and instructors can be extremely busy people. Professors also make their living by being really good at thinking and coming up with ideas, so when you go to bounce ideas off of them or to help develop your own ideas, you're essentially asking them to do for free what they should be getting paid to do. As such, it is extremely important that you not expect professors to do all of your thinking for you. You should do a lot of reading and thinking before you meet with a professor or instructor about your research ideas, and then your meeting or discussion with that professor will only be about refining and perfecting your ideas, rather than about brainstorming and getting new ideas.

You need have no such anxieties, though, about meeting with fellow students and friends about your research ideas. Feel free to brainstorm with friends and peers, as long as they are willing to do so, and you may find that this experience is both rewarding and enjoyable. One extremely useful thing about discussing research and research ideas with your peers is the simplification of your language and ideas. When you talk to a professor or colleague about your work, you may be tempted to use bigger words and ideas than you would use when talking to someone who doesn't know about your field. If you can describe your ideas in simple language to someone who doesn't know about it, you can be pretty certain that you yourself actually understand that idea pretty well.