How-to and tips

How to Select a Research Topic for your PhD Thesis?

Objective behind any research is to fill a gap in the body of knowledge that already exists in the field of your study. For instance, if you have thousands of people studying about artificial intelligence including how it works, how it can be used in corporate, what ethical questions it raises, how will it impact the business, and so on but you hardly see a paper talking about the impacts of AI on employees of corporate then that will serve a gap worth exploring through a research.
A thesis is a big document that is created at the time of completion of your PhD which means during PhD, you are researching on one such topic. Imagine yourself exploring the topic for 3-5 years before you come up with a thesis document which will mark the completion of your PhD post submission and acceptance. Your research topic has to be really important for the academic world for you to spend years on researching it. This is what makes it challenging for you to choose the right topic for your PhD. It has to be important.
Your thesis topic or PhD topic should also be vast enough to be able to explore it in depth for years. For example, understanding how AI affects employees could be a good topic for a research but would you like to keep exploring it for 5 years? Will you even get enough of stuff to explore? May be you will but you have to take a call on the basis of the amount of information that can come under your topic and the importance it carries to academic, business, or social world. Another criteria that you would not want to skip when choosing a topic is the level of interest or passion you have for it. PhD is a long journey that would need your patience and if you are obsessed with your topic, you won’t feel pain but pleasure in reading hundred of documents and talking to everyone to gather insights.

How to identify a topic?

The first step is to begin with your interest. You have to be interested in PhD topic because you are not doing it for any normal degree but to get a doctorate and your topic will set your career path ahead and create a differentiation for you in research or academic world.
Exploring interests

• Data analytics
• Business Intelligence
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data Science
• Consumer psychology
• Business Process management
• Marketing strategies
• Strategic management

These are only the wide areas that you can do a research on. Keep your list aside for a  day and then revisit it. As yourself which topic gives you most excitement as compared to others? Let’s say your topic is “Consumer Psychology”.
Exploring topicsYour next step would be to explore what consumer psychology already has to offer and if there is a gap you can fill through your research. Let us begin will a small research exercise here. Go to your favorite search engine and search PDF documents related to your topic. On Google, you can do this by typing “Consumer Psychology filetype:pdf” in the search box. Here is the list of documents that you will get from this search:

• A study on consumers' psychology on marketing tools
• The consumer psychology of brands
• The seven sins of consumer psychology -
• psychological factors influencing consumer behavior
• The Psychology and Behavior of Consumers in the Fashion Industry
• Consumer Psychology and Marketing Overview: An Influence
• Psychological Theories of Consumer Choice
• Toward a Psychology of Consumer Creativity
• Nonconscious Consumer Psychology - Society for Consumer
• The effect of environmental factors on consumer behavior
• Consumer Behavior: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
• Essays on Consumer's Psychological and Behavioral Responses
• Consumer Psychology of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure

Can you identify some themes from these titles? Try exploring them around problems explored, markets discussed, processes, benefits, technologies, industry, etc.
I could identify a few themes from this list and these are:

• Marketing & psychology
• Branding & psychology
• Consumer behavior
• Fashion industry
• Tourism & Hospitality
• Social psychology

You do the same with your topics and come up with themes. Which one of the themes would you like to explore? Let’s take an example of marketing & psychology. Now you know the area you want to explore and next step is to find out the gap in the specific area of your choice.

Finding gap - Let’s go to Google again and search for “Psychology of marketing filetype:pdf” Here is the list of topics you will find under this theme –

• Psychology-based marketing
• Psychological factors influencing consumer behavior
• Social psychology and marketing
• Influence of behavioral psychology on consumer psychology
• Application of evolutionary psychology in marketing
• Brand consumer storytelling theory
• Psychology of color in marketing and branding
• Building consumer brand relationship
• Environmental psychology and product design
• Psychology and behavior of consumers in fashion industry
• Creative strategies in social media marketing

Exploring more - By this time, you will know that there are only a few selected areas in your theme that have ben explored by researchers. For example, influence of psychology on consumer behavior, psychology based marketing, impact of psychology on marketing, branding, and marketing strategies. Can you now think of a topic which is not being covered here? Here are a few ways you can –

• Try to connect two topics – ex. Psychology based marketing and consumer behavior –You’re your topic could be - Exploring the impact of psychology based marketing on consumer behavior
• Change the perspective – ex. Consumer brand relationship can be changed to consumer product relationship – And your topic can be – Exploring relationships between consumers and products from the psychological lens
• Change or expand one part of it – Ex. Psychology of color in marketing can be changed to psychological influence of visual elements on consumers

Finding gap An alternative is to find a real gap by exploring a few papers on your subject of interest. Reads introduction to find out what the paper explored and conclusion to find out what it discovered. Read at least 5 papers and then make note of what was explored and what was discovered. Then you have to apply your critical mind to identify the gap that still exists. There can also be a paper actually talking about the gap in the limitations section that you can directly take forward.
For ex. The paper - Creative Strategies in Social Media Marketing: An Exploratory Study of Branded Social Content and Consumer Engagementhas a section Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research which suggests use of gratification theory to understand how creative strategies can be effective in marketing. You can use this as your base for research. The existing paper would then become your foundation and you can build upon it to explore.
There are many ways you can identify topic for your PhD thesis. The more you explore, the more are your chances of getting to an ideal topic that will hold good before universities offering your PhD.