How to make your small ideas into a research paper? I am a computer science PhD student who works mostly in theory. I always have multiple ideas in my mind about the research problem I am working on and also on problems which are related to my research. Many times my ideas were vague and not important, and many of my ideas have led to algorithms which are not in themselves enough for a paper. In the last couple of years I have given many ideas to my labmates and others. My colleagues say that some of these were very good, but so far, I have not able to find anything so big that it becomes a paper. Is there any way to makes my ideas more valuable and more significant?

Question: How to make your small ideas into research paper?
One of my biggest regrets is not writing down small ideas. There were waiting for a better time. But usually this time never came - either because I didn't find a good way to expand on the project, or because new projects left little time.

In There are no projects like side projects (which I wrote after finishing my PhD) there is:


  If you have a great project, do moonlight. Don’t wait for better times, because they won’t come. Maybe you overstate the need of money, institutional support or social confirmation?


Depending on the project, it can be a small draft (e.g. with a theorem and some comments on possible approaches to prove it) or a GitHub repository with code and some description.

Once something is shared, there are two main benefits:


you can talk about it / send it to your colleagues,
you made some progress, even if it is a small step, it's strictly more than nothing. 


Occasionally, during the writing phase you may:


see how to expand on it,
or realise that actually you already did a lot,
or discover that it is flawed (e.g. your proof is trivial or incorrect).


Additionally, if a few years later someone ask you - you will be able to recover it quickly, along with its core content (formulae, citations, etc).
Sharing means that you can share it with your future self.

Is it just a one-page LaTeX note? Just write it.