How to choose a research project that you are passionate about:

Science research isn’t easy to start. It is super overwhelming, there is a lot of information to digest, and there are so many tips and tricks being thrown at you left and right that make it really easy to get confused and still not know where to start. For these reasons, it’s important to start at the very beginning, how can you choose a research topic that you are passionate about, and that is something you can investigate.

The first step to conducting any form of independent research is coming up with a research topic that aligns with your specific interests and the resources and skill sets that you have. In scientific research, a major problem that many researchers around the world face is the lack of funding from the government. It is therefore important to consider the resources you have at hand. For example, you should ask yourself if you have access to a lab or if you have basic coding knowledge. These factors help create a successful project, but it is possible to still get great research without them, or with limited use. 

After considering what you have, the next step is to actually dive into your research topic and what you specifically want to do. This guide has a list of steps for what you should do to pick the best possible research topic. It is fine if you don’t follow the list of steps exactly; the list is here to help guide you through any part of your journey that you aren’t completely sure about. 

Step 1: Identify a topic/area of interest

When planning on conducting any form of research, most people have a very broad idea in mind. For example, they might want to explore a specific disease like Alzheimer’s or diabetes. Maybe they want to go into the world of genetics and explore that further. While these are extremely broad topics and are nowhere near specific enough, they are perfect to start with. Make sure this broad topic is something you are genuinely passionate about because passion means better research. You also don’t have to have much prior knowledge to research or the topic itself, but make sure it is something that you can work with.

Step 2: Start a surface-level dive into the broad subject you have chosen

Now it is time to become acquainted with your broad research idea. This is where you begin to narrow down your focus from the broad idea that you started out with and pick specific keywords and phrases. Some strategies or places you can go to first are quick Google searches, AI summaries of the topic, and even Wikipedia. My recommendation is Wikipedia because it has a lot of information with sublinks embedded in the text that allow you to dive into multiple ideas at the same time. You can learn more and more about these different phrases, and keep track of what they mean and how they all relate to each other at a big picture level.

 In addition, you will want to start keeping track of your initial research, papers, and notes in a research notebook, which can either be a paper one or on Google Docs, Colab, or a Word document. This will help later when writing your paper, and it is needed for science fairs and competitions. Resources and extra note guides will be coming soon!

Note: AI is a useful tool for explaining key concepts, words, and ideas that would take a lot longer to understand. It is efficient and easy, which is why I recommend using it in the initial stages of trying to learn new words. However, do not become super reliant on it as you go on with your research, because then the AI ends up conducting the research for you, and you don’t develop the skills you need to be an independent researcher.

Step 3: Topic Brainstorm

Once you have done a literature search and narrowed down your ideas further to a chain of related words under your broad topic, it’s time to pick your favorite specific ideas and begin to dive into them even further. I would recommend having a list of 5 or 6 topics with lots of information under them, and then narrowing it down to 1 or 2 ideas from there. After, look further at the surface-level research you did for these topics and see if there are any problems or discrepancies within what has already been done that a potential research project can help to solve. When looking back at the words you have explored, look for some problems or ideas that scientists need further experimentation on. At this point in choosing your research topic, you still don’t need a super concrete idea, just a narrowed-down chain of thoughts, and most importantly, a PROBLEM to solve. Again, this will be more clear as you get through the following steps.

Step 4: Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/ 

Using the information, words, and ideas you already have, start looking into more coherent studies on them using Google Scholar. This is a free search engine by Google that has published scientific studies from all over the world conducted by professionals at universities of corporate labs. There are resources like articles, books, academic and conference papers all from scholarly websites, universities, and publishers from different fields of research. 

This is where you will read your first research paper, which is a huge learning curve for many because of the extremely complex language and ideas being presented. I will go over how to read scientific papers in more depth in a future blog post, but my main tips for starting are reading the abstract first. This is the most important part because it is a summary of the entire paper, what the study is about, and its findings. This will help you determine if the paper you are reading is what you are looking for. Then, go over the introduction because it has all of the background information you need to understand the topic. This part is fairly easy to understand as long as you take notes and follow along with the new vocabulary as you go. Never be afraid to write down your thoughts and ideas, or to make a vocabulary list as you read (this is encouraged)! You can skip over the methods for now, but you might need to go back over them when you are trying to plan out an experiment (another topic for another post) and go straight to the results or discussion. The most important thing to remember here is you don’t have to memorize numbers or values, but rather what the study means, the trends of the results, and their significance. Arguably, the most important part of the study is the discussion, which goes over the results, the trends, future directions, and limitations.

Step 5: Find gaps in knowledge

We know that science is an ever-evolving field where discoveries are made every day, changing the field and adding to our knowledge. This means that if you look at the right parts of published research, you can also find areas of your topics of interest that need more work and potential studies to be conducted. The future directions and limitations are the parts of the paper that you are going to find the most useful for this. The future directions talk about how their study can be expanded on in the future, giving you ideas and grounds for new experimental ideas based on the topics you had initially picked out. In addition, limitations talk about ways that the study itself could be improved on, another way you can get more specific research ideas. You might need to read more than one paper to get a more solid idea and accumulate more information to work with, but following the overall steps and tips that you did for the first paper you read, you will have a solid understanding of your topic and a stronger research topic. This is officially the step where you are going to have a problem that you can solve or answer based on your topic of interest. You also have a research question that you can answer.

Step 6: Come up with a hypothesis

From the previous step, you now have a problem to solve or a research question to answer. Now it's time to translate this sentence into a hypothesis, which will be your road map in your research project. A hypothesis is an educated guess based on the papers and knowledge you have already accumulated and taken notes on in your research notebook. It doesn’t have to be correct, but it does have to be well formed because the hypothesis serves as your roadmap through your research project. It will guide you from the starting point of your project and continue to remind you of what you are specifically trying to investigate and find. 

A good hypothesis follows the if-then-because format, where the “if” is the context, the “then” is your guess on what will happen based on the context, and the “because” is the explanation for why you made the claim (the warrant). It is sort of like an argument with the claim, evidence, and warrant when looking at the hypothesis from a humanities perspective. 

By following the above list of steps as best as possible, it is a great guide and start for developing a strong, first research project. Again, because this is your first research topic and you have very little exposure to the world of scientific research, the topic might be relatively overdone or not niche. THIS IS OKAY. It is your first project, and by no means will it be perfect on your first go. Make sure to trust the process, pick something you are actually passionate about, and learn as much about the topic as you can. It’s all about building up your experience and your passion for the subject!