1. TJTS505: Master's Thesis Seminar
Lecture 2: Find a good topic
Dr. Shuaiqiang Wang
Department of CS-IS, JYU

2. How to find a good topic
A good topic is essential in research activities
How to find a good topic?
Discuss with your supervisors and other experts
Look for topics by yourself
Literature review is critical

3. Literature review levels
Everybody knows it is important to review literatures
According to your purposes, there are several levels to review literatures
Level 1: Title, abstract, conclusions, importance (level of publisher, year, #citation, authors)
Level 2: Introduction, related work, problem formulation and concept definition, theories and techniques in high level
Level 3: Detailed theories and techniques, experimental setting and results, discussion
Level 4: Sentence by sentence

4. Review literatures with purposes
Level 1 & 2: Find your topics
Level 2 & 3: Get familiar with your area, design your research plan, and write literature review
Level 3: Implementations
Level 4: Learn how to write scientific papers and theses

5. How to find a good topic?
Know the leading conferences and journals in your research area
Review recent papers and make notes
Mainly depends on level 1: Title, abstract, conclusions, importance (level of publisher, year, #citation, authors)
Partially with level 2: Introduction, related work, problem formulation and concept definition, theories/techniques in high level
Draw spectrum pictures or tables
Find your topic

6. Resources Google scholar: https://scholar.google.fi
DBLP:
ResearchGate:
ACM Digital Library:
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
IEEE Xplore:
IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Elsevier:
Springer:

7. What is a good topic? A hot topic vs. not very hot
Significance of the problems
Potential room for investigation
Suitable is always better than perfect

8. Hot vs not so hot Hot topics Advantages Disadvantages
Easy to get published
Generally they are very important
Potential to receive large attentions
Disadvantages
Need to compare with many existing studies
Most likely it will be buried in numerous publications in the future
Not so hot topics: opposite to hot topics

9. Significance of the problems
The expected outputs of the research should be important in academic community or in industry, or both

10. Potential room for investigation
Between the objectives of the problem and the existing results in literatures, there should be plenty of room for investigation
For some problems, the current results are good enough, like fingerprint recognition.
For some problems, they are relative easy to solve, and maybe we can only publish 1-2 papers at most
This issue is not very important for master thesis, but very important for doctoral students

11. Suitable is always better than perfect
You need to consider the following issues
Your background and skills
CS: Mathematics and programing skills
IS: Management background
Your supervisors’ research interests

12. Resources
Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper: The C.A.R.S. Model

13. homework
Everyone: send your evaluation form to me which assesses your picked thesis
Subject of your TJTS505:Thesis assessment + Your full name
Deadline: 6PM Today (September 23)
Demonstrate your evaluation results in groups (>=1)
Find your group member who evaluate the same thesis
Discuss your opinions in groups
Oral presentation with slides
Try to make your A4 research plan
Subject of your TJTS505: A4 research plan + Your full name
Deadline: 6PM, October 20

14. Any Questions?