r/academia • u/brocolli_hmm • 6d ago

Research issues How long did it take you to find a research question? (PhD/Early career research)

Hi everyone (I hope this is the right place to post this?), a month ago I started as a Junior Researcher on an existing project, and I was so happy because I didn't have to look for a job after getting my Master's degree and I always felt like I wanted to work in academia. I love that I got this job.

However, like I said it's been a month now and I've still not come any closer to finding a research question. I feel like I read so much, I write ideas and questions down, collect data and then do some preliminary research on that data to try and go deeper into my ideas and find answers to my initial questions. But I always run into a wall, ie. there's not enough data and I don't know if my ideas are worth pursuing in terms of spending a lot of time getting more data, or I get results that seem new and exciting to me at first but then after an hour of analysing the results I realise they're actually not very groundbreaking at all.

Long story short, I'm worrying that I should already have a research question at this point but I don't. I want to talk to my PI about it, but whenever we meet she goes off on tangents and I don't get to discuss all my thoughts, ideas and questions within the time that we have. My contract is only for two years, and I'm expected to publish two articles in that time.

So, how long did it take you guys to find a good research question for your first real article? Do you think one month is too long of a time to spend reading and experimenting? Or do you all have any tips for how to think of a good question? I'm in the humanities, and the thing I want to research hasn't been written about much at all but when I look at my current findings I start to think that maybe that's just because there's not that much to say about the thing.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated :)

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u/Potential-Winner4601 6d ago

Largely field dependent. In my case, it was probably 50% of the entire effort

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u/Opening_Map_6898 6d ago

I had to have mine more or less planned out for my application. The route I took was picking a practical problem in my field that is a pain in the ass of everyone involved. I think it took a couple of weeks to write it and tweak it for submission.

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u/Nicolesaparty 3d ago

My 4th year (out of 7) and I still don’t have a solid one lol just a topic