“But
madam I haven’t a clue where to begin looking for the topic” was the bewildered
query of most new entries to the postgraduate course in my department. While at
the time I did not have a well-phrased way of telling them what to do, I used
to describe the steps, which I accept were not novel, and possibly followed by
most guides and mentors.
The
process as I used to explain involved looking for an area or field of study
that was of interest to the student and then reading as many literature reviews
as possible to find, and understand the current knowledge and the gaps. Then
progressively narrowing down to the most recent findings on a topic and then
applying a different/advanced technique,
a larger or different sample, different
criteria or different study type to the same problem /query.
This
system of moving from known to peripheral unknowns worked. Now I realize it is
a well-recognized concept termed as “Adjacent Possible” in innovative thinking that
was popularized by Steven Johnson in an essay called "The Genius of the Tinkerer" .
In
case you are looking for that, a spark of
intuition, for a research topic and it doesn’t happen
to take heart and look closely at
what is already known, chances are your answer is closer than you think.
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