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Sources of Research Topic Generation: Lessons From Proficient Researchers of Business Management Disciplines
Abstract
Journal publications are an output of research though there is little research into the process that led to the outcome and the lack of discussion and debate surrounding the process leads to an allure of mysticism. This paper studies the norms of research through investigating how successful business researchers choose their research topics. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with business researchers. Generating topic ideas by successful researchers were separated into two general sources: ‘Professional Capacity’ and ‘Individual Motivators’. The main Professional Capacity sources were students and previous research. These Professional Capacity sources can be used by an established researcher. The most valuable Individual Motivator is to read. Researchers also revealed that they chose topics they found intrinsically interesting rather than topics that would necessary have a significant impact on the literature. To achieve research and publication success, it is important to make research part of your routine and read, attend conferences, submit your work for review, and persevere.
... It is important to adopt proper strategies so that they do not struggle for this purpose. This paper examines the available literature (Kumar, 2011;Saunders et al, 2009;Hulley et al, 2013;Kothari, 1985;Young, 2019;Parija and Kate, 2018;Jensen, 2013;Tayie, 2005;Donaghey, 2020;France, 2019;Lindawati, 2017) from a fresh perspective based on the author's experience. It suggests strategies on how to generate ideas and how to transform those ideas into research topics for a Ph. ...
Selection of a research topic is a challenge for students and professionals alike. This paper addresses those challenges by presenting some strategies based on existing body of knowledge and the author’s own experience. It identifies the attributes necessary to
effectively generate ideas and to convert those ideas into research topics. The study proposes a ‘FRIENDS’ framework comprising seven best practices for selecting a research topic for Ph.D. dissertations or research projects. An example of using the suggested framework is presented.
One of the most challenging aspects of research is choosing a suitable topic. It is hard not to be intimidated by unlimited subjects in every field. Formulating effective research questions is one way to ease the stress of choosing a topic. Regrettably, some problems often arise as students attempt to formulate questions and topics. Researchers can avoid painful and frustrating wasted hours by recognising potential problems. This research employs bibliometric analysis with the R software to examine data obtained from Scopus database. The results show that there are limited number of papers available on this topic in the Scopus database. There is undoubtedly a gap in this area of research and therefore more research needs to be conducted on identifying a researchable topic. This paper provided guidelines to identify a potential research topic with a constructive approach. Researchers can reduce frustration and wasting of time by avoiding topic apathy, selecting a broad topic, not reading enough, and not being inquisitive enough. Researchers should focus on three significant features: capability, appropriateness, and relevance. The paper suggested beginning the process of identifying the research topic by developing a depth of knowledge in the area of interest. The depth can be developed from the literature, beginning from the core to the latest research papers that can be tracked from websites like Google Scholar, Research Gate etc.
The purpose of this article was to explain academic collaboration, to describe typical activities that take place with collaborators, and to discuss some problems that could occur. Although research collaboration is usually rewarding, there can problems in communicating, sharing the workload, and assigning the order of authors in the publication of results. Recommendations to avoid conflict include formal and informal agreements and a good system of communication.
The purpose of this study is to reveal the factors that affect the identification of research problems in educational administration studies. The study was designed using the case study method. Criterion sampling was used to determine the work group; the criterion used to select the participants was that of having a study in the field of educational administration. Within this scope, the sample was composed of 29 people from various Turkish universities who have conducted studies in the field of educational administration. Content analysis was used to analyze the data collected via a semi-structured interview form. As a result of the content analysis, educational administration researchers’ statements about the factors deemed effective in identifying research problems have been grouped under five main themes. These themes are as follows: (i) “criteria for identifying research problems,” including the sub-themes of the nature of the problem, personal criteria, the literature and academic relationships; (ii) “resources for identifying research problems,” including publications, the literature, academic shareholders, other disciplines, written/visual media and personal criteria sub-themes; (iii) “criteria for limiting the extent of research problems,” including methodological criteria, personal criteria, the nature of the problem, the literature and academic stakeholders; (iv) “criteria for assessing research problems,” including the nature of the problem, the literature, academic criteria and personal criteria; and (v) “theory-practice balance in research problems,” including personal criteria, the nature of the problem, methodological criteria and the literature.
The role of academic faculty is research, teaching, and service. In an environment that requires research, there appears to be little published discussion of the scholarly activity conducted by proficient researchers. There are few researched and published papers on researcher's activities and habits to conduct research. The lack of research on the activities of researchers leads to the practice of research viewed as mysticism. An exhaustive search of research into the factors and scholarly activities of academic business researchers is presented in this paper to understand what researchers do to generate and produce research. The review is intended to capture current 'best research practice', as guidance for developing researchers who are themselves seeking to become established. A framework of factors and activities impacting on the tertiary institute researcher is developed, and journal papers are reviewed. The review indicates that researchers are influenced by daily activities, personal characteristics, career stages, and institutional environments. A number of environmental factors appear to affect productivity of researchers and personal qualities of researchers are also found to be important. Career, time allocation, and performance assessment impacts are discussed.
Copyright and ownership of research ideas is questionable as to which author the credit should be attached to. Mining author contributions has to be approached more semantically to solve this issue. Representing the research ideas using topic distributions substantiate the measuring of author contributions. Author Topic Models (ATM) are generally obtained by applying topic modeling approaches over an author’s research articles. ATMs form the blueprints of an author. Given a research paper and the blueprints of it’s’ authors, identifying the contribution of every author in the article becomes easy. This paper proposes the generation of ATMs by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).
Authors become more productive when their research articles are well cited by fellow researchers. The reason for such volume of citations might be due to their collaborative nature of research workflow. Though the content of research article does have a major say in determining the citations, investigations on influence of popularity of author(s) and the nature of collaboration would reveal a great amount of information as to what made these researchers to achieve enormous citations. This paper discusses the collaboration and authorship analysis of 'Lutz Bornmann, ' the most cited author till date in Journal of Informetrics (JOI).
Academic standards are being assaulted by cyber criminals who have been introducing fake academic journals, which can look to the uninitiated to be publications that comply with the established standards of the academic community. This new form of cybercrime, predatory and counterfeit journals, has impacted the academic publishing landscape and has resulted in some unsuspecting academics being defrauded and having an indelible black mark on their publishing record. It is critical that the all members of academic community be made aware of these new phenomena in order to avoid being associated with them. It is also critical that universities monitor these developments and keep their staff fully informed of the developments in such criminal activities.