Research Topics by Field
From AI to education, psychology and business. Pick a discipline to view the full collection.
- AI & Machine Learning
- What changes about training a network once you make it very deep?
- Can a model detect text another model wrote, when the stakes are prescription fraud?
- Blockchain & Cryptocurrency
- Do the incentives in a blockchain protocol really make honest behavior the best strategy?
- What is lost when a vague legal contract becomes an executable one?
- Biotech & Genetic Engineering
- How does a bacterium decide which piece of an infection to remember?
- Could cells be made to keep a written record of the signals they received?
- Business & Management
- Does a safety-first operating philosophy actually turn a company into a learning organization?
- Who leaves after being passed over for promotion, and what makes the rest stay?
- Communication
- What belongs in a crisis communication plan, and who is it really written for?
- Why does medication teaching fail at the bedside?
- Computer Science & IT
- What does graph theory give an algorithm designer that a purely algorithmic view misses?
- Can a distributed protocol be verified once and hold for any number of processes?
- Cybersecurity
- How do you find malware that exists only in memory, on a platform the usual tools cannot image?
- Is zero trust network access measurably safer than a VPN, or only newer?
- Data Science & Analytics
- What has to change before causal inference works on data nobody designed?
- How should uncertainty be handled when a model is chosen by its own predictions?
- Education & Learning
- Should professional development be differentiated for teachers the way lessons are for students?
- What does belonging look like to a four-year-old, and how would you know?
- Environmental Science
- Which regions lose most from climate impacts on crops, and which adaptations actually help?
- How does irrigation change water quality downstream in an agricultural basin?
- Finance & Accounting
- How much of firm performance can be traced to a CEO's background rather than the firm's?
- What does the credit reporting system do to the households inside it?
- Healthcare
- How quickly does a change in reproductive health policy show up in care people receive?
- Where does machine learning genuinely improve a clinical prediction?
- Journalism
- Did the press frame the heroin epidemic and the opioid crisis as the same story?
- How do reporters fact-check in a country where the press itself is under attack?
- Marketing & Advertising
- How does a social media campaign shift event attendance intentions among university students, and do awareness and interest move independently?
- Does a centralized or a devolved marketing structure produce better enrollment yield in a university?
- Mental Health & Wellbeing
- Can a culturally tailored program shift stigma inside an immigrant community?
- How do you tell whether an antidepressant is working, and on whose measure?
- Neuroscience
- How is movement control organized across a sensorimotor cortex that looks uniform?
- How does a brain keep an aversive memory useful without letting it take over?
- Nursing
- Does virtual reality simulation improve a nursing student's clinical judgment, or only their confidence in it?
- Does training primary care staff to spot oral health problems change referral rates?
- Political Science
- Do the criteria a county uses to site ballot drop boxes put them where the least-served voters actually are?
- What happens to a legislator's workload once reelection stops being possible?
- Public Health & Epidemiology
- Did Medicaid expansion reach the states that needed it most?
- Which social determinants show up first in preterm birth rates?
- Psychology
- How does mentorship differ for Black students in counselor education programs?
- How much of a therapeutic outcome is set by what the client expected going in?
- Robotics & Automation
- Can a printed strain sensor survive being part of the thing it measures?
- How does a drone hold a path underground with no satellite fix?
- Sociology
- What happens to plea bargaining when a police union slows its officers down?
- How do white residents describe belonging in a neighborhood that is changing around them?
How to Find a Research Topic
If you’re struggling to get started, this step-by-step tutorial will help you find a topic that is original, valuable and actually feasible.
Research Topic FAQs
What exactly is a research topic?
A research topic is the subject of your study: the problem you'll investigate, or the question you'll answer, in your dissertation or thesis.
It has to be specific enough to research properly. “Climate change and agriculture” is an area of interest. “How rising temperatures have affected crop yields in one region over the last twenty years” is a topic, because you can see what the study would actually do.
What makes a good research topic?
Three things: originality, value and feasibility.
- Originality – it explores something new, or takes a fresh angle on an existing area.
- Value – the answer matters to someone, whether that's other researchers or people working in the field.
- Feasibility – you can actually pull it off with the time, data and resources you have.
We go deeper into each one in our guide to choosing a dissertation topic.
Research topic vs research problem: what's the difference?
They're easy to confuse, but they differ in scope. A research topic is the broad focus of your study. A research problem is one specific issue or gap in knowledge within it.
Say your topic is “teenage pregnancy in the United Kingdom”. That covers causes, prevention, health outcomes and more. The research problems live inside it, for example:
- What factors contribute to higher rates of teenage pregnancy in certain communities?
- How do different parenting styles affect teen pregnancy rates?
- Which interventions have reduced teenage pregnancies?
The topic is the umbrella. The problem is the one question you'll actually answer under it.
How do I find potential research topics?
Start with an area you genuinely care about, read what's been published in it, and look for the questions the literature hasn't settled. Then test each idea for originality, value and feasibility.
We walk through every step in our guide to finding a dissertation topic, and the video above covers the same process.
How do I find quality sources for my topic?
Start with peer-reviewed journal articles, academic books and completed dissertations. Databases such as Google Scholar, JSTOR and your university library are the quickest route to them.
Before you rely on a source, check four things:
- Author credibility – is the author an expert in the field?
- Date – is it current enough for your topic?
- Objectivity – does it weigh the evidence fairly?
- Relevance – does it speak to your question, or only to the general area?
Websites can help you get oriented, but check who wrote them and when before you cite one. Once you know the literature, you're ready to look for a gap in it.
How do I find a good research gap?
A research gap is a question the existing literature hasn't answered well, and finding one is how a topic earns its originality. We explain the main types of gap, with examples, and how to spot them in this post.
How should I evaluate my topic ideas?
Score each idea against the same three criteria: originality, value and feasibility. A good topic takes a fresh angle, matters to someone, and is realistic given your time and resources. Our free Research Topic Evaluator worksheet lets you score your shortlist side by side.
Then ask two personal questions. Does it point toward where you want to go next, whether that's a job, a field or a PhD? And are you interested enough to stay with it for months? Motivation is a resource too, and it runs out fastest on a topic you chose only because it looked easy.
How do I check whether a topic is feasible?
Work through four checks before you commit:
- Expertise – you don't need to be an expert yet, but you do need enough grounding in the area to get started.
- Time – some topics take far longer than others, especially if they depend on other people, institutions or collaborators.
- Resources – equipment, software, database access, participants, and the cost of any of them.
- Risks – ethical approval, access to the data you need, equipment that fails, and funding that doesn't come through.
If a topic fails one of these, narrow or adjust it now. It's much cheaper than finding out halfway through.
Stuck on your research topic?
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