While the central part of the book was focused on transferable skills such how to write and how to present which are relevant to anyone doing scientific research, the last three chapters of this book focus on skill that you need at a later stage of your career: how to lead a research group, how to get funded, and today subject, how to choose a research topic.
Chapter 8 starts by re-analysing the purposes of scientific research and, from this, discusses why one should choose fundamental rather than applied research and how the research question differs across this divide. We briefly explain what Pasteur’s Quadrant is, and then we move to the core question: how do we choose our next topic to research?
As usual, I first reviewed what was said about this, and I found very little; we report it in the book, but this left me quite unsatisfied. Thus, I decided to take a completely different approach. From 1990 to 2023, I selected 211 papers in which I was an author or co-author and in which I chose the research topic (in many papers, I contributed to a topic chosen by others). I clustered them into research topics, then looked back at how we ended up choosing that topic over another. In the end, I came out with 12 cases worth discussing:
1. The topic of my student’s project
2. The topic of interest for my boss
3. Some false starts
4. Topics I handed over to co-workers
5. Topics that I have investigated throughout my career
6. Topics imposed by funding opportunities
7. Topics imposed by problems I was asked to solve
8. Topics that dry up over time
9. Topics that resonated with my environment
10. Topics well aligned with my institution's scope
11. Topics compatible with my other duties
12. Topics that titillated my curiosity
In the chapter, I discuss each of them, seeking generalisable elements from a very personal history. As I do, I made some digressions. I use Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” to reflect on how the state of the scientific sub-domain, as Kuhn calls it, a paradigm shift, impacts the choice of research topics. I start from a nice LinkedIn article by Corina Anghel and debate how our broad vs. deep psychological type affects our career and the choice of research topics. Next, I cite Michel Foucault’s book “Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines” to reflect on how interdisciplinary research domains form and how choosing topics in these “middle grounds” is a matter of timing, as it is for most things in life.
The last digression is on the good and bads of forming very large research groups, and how this impacts your choice of research topics.
I conclude by citing Oprah Winfrey: “Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do”, proposing that the concept of “ignorantness” offered by Paolo Cevoli (sorry, in italian only) is key to any scientist, and then citing Quincy Jones, who asked about ego, replies: “You need confidence, sure. But ego is overdressed insecurity. I think you have to dream so big that you can't get an ego. Because you will never fulfil all those dreams”.
dream bigger dreams!
Enjoy the reading!
Summary of Chapter 8 of “The Craft of Scientific Research”, by Marco Viceconti, self-published and Green Open Access book on the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18069190.
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