The research topic or theme

Author: Stephen J. Turnbull
Organization: Faculty of Engineering, Information, and Systems at the University of Tsukuba
Contact: Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
Date: July 9, 2020
Copyright: 2020, Stephen J. Turnbull
Topic:Research

Your research topic or theme is the idea you are proposing, including both the problem or mystery you want to solve, and the field from which you take its method of solution. It is stated in general audience terms (compared to a research question, which is stated in technical terms). For undergraduates, "general" often means "educated adult". For graduate students, it usually means "in your general field but not your specialty."

There are two main purposes of this checklist. First, if you answer the "yes/no" questions 1--7 honestly, you have a measure of how well you understand your theme (whether or not you have made progress in completing the research!) in terms of how many "definitely yes" answers you can give. Second, as mentioned below, you should never stop with a "yes" or "no" answer. In each case, you should provide some supporting statement. The collection of these statements is your "elevator pitch", [1] explaining why your topic is worth listening to, and why you are the person to listen to.

Research topic checklist

Prepare short statements addressing the following.

Write your topic statement here.

Remember this is not a title, nor an abstract. It should be one complete sentence, or perhaps two, covering at most 3 lines. Try for 2.

Then check the following points. Note that even though a question appears to ask for a yes or no answer, you should explain that answer. Because length allowed for the topic statement is very short, you may need to use a short form for the information, or even allow readers to infer the answer from the general knowledge you expect them to have already. These questions allow you to either explain a very brief reference, or to explain why you expect the reader to infer information you don't provide explicitly.

  1. Does your topic statement provide a clear problem?
  2. Does it state the problem in terms of a cause and effect relationship?
  3. Does your topic statement indicate the research field?
  4. Do you have a one-line explanation of why your audience should listen to you?
  5. Do you have a one-line explanation of why you decided to study this topic? (It's often helpful to interest your audience if this is different from 3!)
  6. Do you have a statement indicating the specific research method to be used? (It may not be a good idea to include this in your topic statement, as technical terms may tend to "exclude" some of your audience. On the other hand, the research method is frequently included in paper titles to contrast with previous research.)
  7. Do you have a statement of expected results?
[1]"Elevator pitch" is American business slang for "short statement of advocacy". It comes from the common practice when a low-ranking person finds themselves in an elevator with an executive, and tries to leapfrog their boss by getting the executive to support their project before they get out of the elevator. "Pitch" is a general term for a sales talk or sales point.