Hey, it’s Dr. Liu here again. In previous videos, we have discussed how to select good research question, and the principles to set research objectives. In this video, we will continue to talk about how to narrow down our research question to have the right level of focus.
First, why do we want to narrow down? There are two reasons. The first reason is that, for a narrower topic, it is often easier for us to make solid contribution. It is more likely we can do deep and complete work. And it may take less time for us to get the work done and get published. The second reason is that, if we choose a broader topic, we will have more competitions from other researchers, and it is more likely we may either repeat other people’s efforts, or contradict with other people’s findings. As Arthur Schawlow said, “To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know one thing that isn't known.” Usually, selecting a well-focused topic is the best way to make quick, unique and solid contribution in a certain field, and it is also a wise way to cooperate with other researchers in the research community.
Therefore, after we identify a critical research need, we usually need to narrow it down to have the right level of focus. But how narrow our research topic should be? Different people may have different preference. Usually, the narrower our research topic, the less related studies we can find in literature. For a well focused research topic, we should be able to find right amount of related work in literature that we can handle. The topic should not be too broad to handle. And it should also not be too narrow to have a significant impact that we want.
First, we want to turn our topic into a set of questions. Formulating well-focused questions is often the first step in a literature search. This will help us to find the focus for our research. The questions should be clear enough to guide our thinking. We may want to express the question in several different ways or break the question into sub-questions to clarify its meaning. Some questions may have assumptions behind it. We want to make sure that we are clear about these assumptions. Once we have our first version of research questions, the next step is to conceptualize these questions.
We want to break down the questions into concepts. We want to identify and understand the key concepts in our topic. It may be a good idea to read a chapter in a specialized textbook or encyclopedia, or to read a literature review to understand these key concepts. After we have done that, we may ask ourselves, are we still satisfied with the topic and questions we formulated? If not, we can go back and modify them.
Next, we want to go deep by running literature search by these concepts. As we identify key concepts, we want to brainstorming synonyms and related concepts. We need to be careful when dealing with terminology or nomenclature. Sometimes different authors use different language to describe the same concepts, we want think of every possible alternate terms of the key concepts and include all of them in our search. For example, if there are two key concepts in our topic, represented as A and B, in our search, we may combine different terms for the same concept with “OR”, and then combine the two concepts using “AND”.
As we run the search, we may identify important authors and leading research groups in our field and follow their work. We may identify appropriate research methodologies and validated instruments. And we may also identify variations in terms used by researchers and define our own terminology. Sometimes, we may identify key journals in our field and browse them cover to cover. Most important, we want to ask our selves, do we have too many or too few results? After scanning the first few items in our results list, we should have a better idea on how we might modify our research questions or our search to get more relevant results. We want to evaluate the available resources for our formulated research question. We want to evaluate both the resources in the literature and our own resources that can be dedicated for this research, to determine whether we should further narrow down our topic.
At this stage, based on the search results, we may be able to identify several aspects of the topic, e.g. different method, geographic locations, categories of processes, etc. Then we may have opportunities to use theses aspects to further focus our topic. Also, we may consider the comments on future research directions in resent papers. If needed, we may go back to refine our research question and repeat the cycle.
Thanks for watching, I am Dr. Liu with research tips for the underdogs. After we identify a good research question, the first thing we want to do is to narrow it down to have the right level of focus. Until next time, let’s keep that in mind to make our life easier.
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