Q: I am confused about which topic I should focus on and which topic I should continue working on for research

Detailed Question -

Respected sir/madam, I am a PhD student from the dept. of Chemistry, IIT Kharagpur. I did a project on boron aluminium gallium metal nano alooy cluster bu using Orca, Pyar software. I can also handle Turbomole, gaussian , multiwfn sotwares. Now I am facing a problem about giving my registration seminar. I can't decide a particular topic on which I can explore my research interest. I want to focus on 'computational study of metal nano alloy cluster', but I'm  unable to decide on which topic I should focus on. Please help me sir/madam to sort out this problem.

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

In today’s competitive world, settling on a novel research topic is becoming increasingly challenging, so originality is most imperative. Skimming through scientific literature on a regular basis will aid in identifying an interesting topic related to the subject of your choice, which you have mentioned to be computational study of metal nanoalloy clusters. That way, you can avoid choosing similar topics and gain better exposure to novel reported findings. Think about what specifically interests you in the computational studies of nanoalloys, and try to focus on the same for a more refined topic. 

Consider what you need to undertake for this topic, in terms of experiments or theoretical calculations needed, timeline, budget, etc. Given your research topic is broad, you can focus on a specific aspect of the same to make your research crisper.  You may also want to consider if the results will be as you expected and if the findings you intend to publish will be of interest to scientists in the related fields.

To ensure that you stay updated on the literature in your domain, we recommend R Discovery, a free research discovery app with relevant, curated literature from over 80 million publications. It has a simple interface and very useful features like notifications on recently published papers in your field of study, personalization, convenient search filters, bookmarking and more. Click here to know more about R Discovery, or download the free app from Google Play or the App Store.

Hope this helps. All the best for your study!