Table of Contents
Research questions
As a PhD student, each time I came up with an idea, I found out someone's had/published it before. Can't come up with bright new ideas, what should I do, what's missing in me, what is it that I'm doing wrong?
As one of the strange people that never have had problems getting new ideas for research since I started on my Master project in microbial-ecology cell biology 1979. My problems are 1. I get too many good research ideas. 2. Having to prioritize 3. Having to dream up new methods to test the ideas. 4. Convincing people that it is worth funding me pursuing this quest into a completely new area (This is actually the largest problem). 5. Convincing Master and PhD students that they should do something where there is basically nul info in the literature about the area. I do not mind then if people “steal my ideas” as long as I know about it and they update me on their progress. I can then follow up something equally or more interesting. At the moment my group is working with fungal-innate immunity developing a fungal system as a model system for faster progress to understand basic innate immunity in Eukaryotes (that includes plants and animals). My little group and one more in France I collaborate with is the only one so far in that area.
If David Hilbert with “You read too much, that is your problem!” meant you read too much within your own focus area (or territory) I completely agree! I recommend my students to read as much as possible in adjacent areas and also expand their knowledge into other areas like bioinformatics, physics, chemistry and not least philosophy of thoughts and concepts. I also encourages practicing different reading styles, skim reading, extractive reading and so on. and even writing a review as part of their master project (the literary summary part they can do but not the synthesis part, that their supervisor have to help with. See my preprint for further instructions Protocol for writing a scientific review External Link. The protocol has been tested on two master students (volunteers), both got their reviews published with peer review and one was with very high IF). Most of my students are going for a PhD and that is actually a philosophy title, do not forget that. We scientists are working with and developing concepts to be able to talk about and model reality. One of the largest hurdles for getting really new ideas is that our concepts and terminology locks our understanding about reality and thoughts about reality into boxes of convention while reality is not so easily boxed-in. But these models will never “become” reality, only a crude tool for communication between scientists and others. I recommend my students to in groups try to discuss the scientific problems without using the normal terminology or invent different terminology for the discussion and also make visual models. Another way is to try to explain your research to a layman. I often do that, or to first year students. Then I have to explain in other words and use analogies. It is amazing how often new ideas gets borne by that practice (I need to have a pen and a notebook at hand so I can halt the lecture and jot the idea down while trying to explain it to the students. They do not mind experience “research in action”!. (Finally: Read Feynman (as Liviu Nicolaescu cited) especially his book “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!”. If you do not get new ideas after that you at least get many laughs).
protocol_for_writing_a_scientific_review_article_with_flowchart.pdf
