An (or the) important starting point of doing a PhD is the subject, the field you want to investigate or the things you think the world (or at least the scientific world) needs to know. But it’s just that, a starting point. Once you dive into the world of journal papers, conference proceedings, technical reports, statistics, data and models, it’s like some unexpected undercurrent is pulling you deeper and deeper into a big pile of papers (at least, if you don’t have an e-reader). It’s easy to get lost in this maze of research findings. And even if you manage to get the papers you really want, it’s not just the end of it, as Eva Lantsoght has described.
Google scholar for example returns more than 1 million results when searching for “traffic information” or “route choice“. ScienceDirect (luckily) returns less results, but 138,950 for “route choice” is still way to much for anyone to ever read. And these are just the easily available results. A lot of technical reports and lots of conference proceedings never end up in these search engines. But wait, it’s not just the subject itself that’s of interest. A lot of various methods, techniques, models, approaches, etc. are published everywhere, of which you need to investigate if these are of interest for your subject, and can be applied. In the field of route choice it’s easy to get lost in all publication for choice modelling and the enormous amount of possibilities.
As I’ve learned along the way, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a matter of diverging and converging. It teaches you to be selective, it teaches you to scope your subject, again and again. It also teaches you even though you never have read 100% of all the interesting and possibly applicable papers, you need to get going with your own research. Doing a PhD is not just about applying the ideas of others, but about implementing and investigating your own ideas. If your idea was already published and investigated, it wouldn’t be worth doing a PhD for.
As easy as this may sound, when you are reading papers, stacked high on your desk, scattered all around your office, it’s difficult to stay focused on your own ideas. I got lost too much in desk research the first year of my PhD. In stead, I should have put my ideas to the test. Develop a few simple models or simulations or perhaps do a few short questionnaires and simple experiments to see if what I expected to be interesting, is in fact so. This helps you in a better understanding of the subject you’re interested in, and gives you hands-on experience with a few models or techniques you can use. And, perhaps even more important these days with externally funded research, it gives you the opportunity to involve your supporters in your research and present results fast. Such an approach does mean you need to get a good balance between desk research and getting your hands dirty. Matt Might mentions this in his productivity tips, tricks and hacks, as iterating towards perfection.
But most important, you need to keep your idea in mind. It’s easy to device a mindmap, cartoon, or a wordle which you can put on the wall in front of you. A daily glance at it keeps you focussed.
“It takes one step to get you of the path,
but you might need many more to get back.”
