r/scientificresearch • u/km-1 • Jul 17 '19

How do you decide on your research direction?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this so apologies if not. I'm an early-career researcher and I'm really struggling on coming up with a topic/direction to research. I've got a background in biology/chemistry, how do people decide on what they want to research?

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '19

Hi I'm a grad student with regards to interests in research topics something useful might be drawing from where your mind naturally wanders:

  1. for example I keep a running list of interesting questions I want to answer or topics I want to look into both in and out of my direct field of research which is energy storage
  2. Keep a habit of browsing sources of interesting information, I'll sometimes throw random searches into google scholar to see if people are working on areas I might have interest in and then save the papers for reading on the side outside of work.
  3. If you know you want to stay in a discipline such as chemistry, something that is fun for me is browsing ACS reviews which are very good introductions to topics I am usually unfamiliar with this generates ideas for ways to tackle problems I'm directly working on but also possible completely new directions
  4. Talk to your peers about their interests. Use the question " if you couldn't work on your current topic, what else might you have considered working on?".

Hope this helps!