PhD students - how do you find a remarkable research topic?
yannis: With hindsight I would suggest the following:(01) Most PhD Research is unremarkable. Do some research in your field, list all PhD theses over the last 30 years and give them a score. How many made a mark on the field? My guess possibly 1/1000. You can do the same with journal papers, possibly 1/3000.(02) Citations is not a measure of success of a research paper/topic. Is this research applied today? Is it useful?(03) The Dons in the UK had one measure of success of a PhD. It had to advance the field and be original. Most Science advances this way. There is one major breakthrough and hundreds of small steps to advance it forward.
(this would probably fall within your second group).(04) Do a social graph on 3-5 topics. Who is working where? If you want to land in say one of the big Research Institutions, make sure that there is on-going research in this area by that Institution.(05) Decide who you want to get married to. Your thesis supervisor would be the most important person for you over the next few years. Is he interested in the research you are interested in?My late professor used to advise that your PhD is you license to carry out research and not your major work.If I had to do it all over again, I would do the social graph and go from there. I would also try and get into an area that scales rather than purple cows or black swans. At the moment anything with a prefix bio is still virgin territory as far as I am concerned.Perhaps if you could let us know your field, people might be able to give you some ideas. You could also try reposting the query as If you had three-five years to do research in Computing/field, what would you choose as a topic and why?