When did you realize your topic wasn't original?

[annoyed]

I'm struggling to find a novel topic for my thesis. I think I may be trying too hard. Nearly everyone in I know is studying something, which in my opinion is not novel. I feel like people bury their heads in the sand or they think making one minor tweak makes it a completely new topic.

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

When I stole it. 

[Kamisha]

I'm struggling to find a novel topic for my thesis. I think I may be trying too hard. Nearly everyone in I know is studying something, which in my opinion is not novel. I feel like people bury their heads in the sand or they think making one minor tweak makes it a completely new topic.

 

I find this post confusing. Can you clarify what you mean by “nearly everyone in I know is studying something, which in my opinion is not novel?” You have to study a topic before you can produce new information about it.

 

The question “When did you realize that your topic wasn’t original?” is one that should only come at the very, very beginning of your research and when you stumble upon it, you need to move on to a different topic.

 

In graduate school, you are expected to master the scholarly research on a topic before you begin writing and proposing new information about it. Thesis projects/dissertations include a literature review wherein you are supposed to illustrate that you have become an expert on your subject matter.

 

So say you want to write something about Shakespeare, for example. Sure, there’s a LOT of information out there about Shakespeare and if you just have an idea off the top of your mind, chances are that it might be written about. But if you master the scholarly research on Shakespeare, you realize that there are still a lot of holes in the scholarship, a lot of questions that still need to be answered. You should focus research where there are holes, not where there aren’t. 

[fuzzylogician]

I feel like people bury their heads in the sand or they think making one minor tweak makes it a completely new topic.

 

That's how progress is made. A PhD is all about becoming an expert in something and making some kind of new contribution to that area of inquiry. It's inevitable that you end up becoming quite specialized and don't propose a new radical approach to everything (or even most things). I like the illustrated guide to a PhD's explanation of this point. 

[danieleWrites]

I figured it out a while ago when I figured out that good papers are written after reading a significant amount of discussion on the subject, not by figuring out the paper and then looking for sources. It was undergrad, a paper about the anti-Walmart movement. Good times.

Originality is one of those ridiculous words that means something different every where you go. Novel is just as ridiculous. Think of it less as "wowza, you cured cancer and solved for world peace!" and more as "what am I adding to the field?"

Isaac Newton said it best, and I paraphrase, he didn't consider his "discovery" of gravity and its laws as something novel or original. Instead, he thought of himself as standing on the shoulders of giants. We have an airline industry because of him, and we all think of him as this gigantic, original thinker. He saw himself as a person who was so familiar with the conversation in his field, that when the proverbial apple bonked him on his proverbial head, he was able to take what he already knew (from what others have done) and add his own voice to it.

So, nah, it's not finding a novel approach that's never been done before. It's finding your footing on the shoulders of the giants in your field.

[annoyed]

Ok "original" is subjective. My point is I was hoping to work on something revolutionary, but I keep finding it's been done already or something similar has been done. I'm thinking I should pick one of the similar (although not exact) topics because that seems to be what most other people are doing.

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

Ok "original" is subjective. My point is I was hoping to work on something revolutionary, but I keep finding it's been done already or something similar has been done. I'm thinking I should pick one of the similar (although not exact) topics because that seems to be what most other people are doing.

Maybe you're not creative enough. 

[rising_star]

Just because something similar has been done isn't a reason not to go with it. My dissertation is based on taking an established method and applying it to a totally different context. Is it revolutionary in the sense that no one else has made that application before? Definitely. Is it revolutionary in the sense of being a complete breakaway from how things have been done before? No, of course not. No one expects that in a PhD dissertation though.

[geographyrocks]

I didn't feel my undergraduate thesis was original or innovative at all.  It was a suggestion by my mentor after my first research proposal failed due to inaccurate data (as in the last 10 years of data that has been collected in the city I'm in has been declared unusable by the EPA).  I was pretty upset about it.  I wanted to prove myself and how smart I was.  After reading a metric ton of research papers, I realized that my proposal on HOW to study it was unique.  And now my results are quite spectacular (at least my mentor and I think they are). 

 

It actually takes a lot of hard work to be original.  You can't just sit around thinking of brilliant ideas.  You really do have to read a metric ton of papers before holes and gaps start appearing.  So start reading.

Edited March 12, 2014 by geographyrocks

[victorydance]

There are two basic approaches to producing something that hits a hole in the literature: taking an already used approach and applying it to a new topic or taking a new approach to a topic that has been done before.

 

I think people really misunderstand what research is about. They have all these grand illusions about people producing groundbreaking research that changes a field forever. This is rarely how it works. Research is incremental. 99% of research is improving methods or testing methods or theories in different contexts. 

[St Andrews Lynx]

There's a reason that it is called graduate school: you are still in the process of learning how to become an independent, successful scholar. At this stage in your education you just don't have the foundation of knowledge or critical thinking skills to come up with something "revolutionary" in your chosen field. That comes later. 

[fuzzylogician]

There are two basic approaches to producing something that hits a hole in the literature: taking an already used approach and applying it to a new topic or taking a new approach to a topic that has been done before.

 

I think people really misunderstand what research is about. They have all these grand illusions about people producing groundbreaking research that changes a field forever. This is rarely how it works. Research is incremental. 99% of research is improving methods or testing methods or theories in different contexts. 

 

This. Honestly, I am surprised how often people come in wanting to re-invent everything and be "original." Yes, maybe sometimes people are simply wrong about everything, but that's rarely the case. Normally, the best theories are the simplest ones. You don't want to change everything, that will make it very implausible that you're on the right track. Most of the time you work on a problem that others have already thought about. You DO NOT want to redo everything a different way; instead, you want to propose a well-motivated reasoning for thinking about things differently than before, because you can identify some problems with that way of thinking. This may involve bringing in an approach that's normally used for other kinds of questions, or bringing new data to bear on how to formulate an existing approach (or both). The fewer changes you can propose to capture all the data, the likelier your proposal is to be on the right track. 

[DeleteMePlease]

Some papers even only summarize/compare other papers and don't contain original research. Those "comparative" papers often have a much higher impact (as they are easier to understand and contain a lot more information) than traditional publications.

Edited March 23, 2014 by GermanStudent