How to search a research topic in post graduation

Hey everyone, it's Staph here. 

So today is Tuesday and hence its the 'Researcher's Day' :p

I know a lot of you post grads out there have brazilian questions regarding what topic to choose

Brazilian questions??? 

Yeah, you see people say zillion, then gazillion etc.  So I made my new word - Brazilian, sounds nice and totally new to me .

Sounds like some country to me.  

Yeah I too thought...

Just zip it and start with the post. You are useless anyways. 

Hehehehe.... Shut up.

What was I talking about?? 

Oh yeah,  research topics. 

Well in case you are lucky enough to have a guide who is already working on some project, then it's more likely that you will be roped in for the same. But like me if you don't have such a case then you will have to search a topic for yourself and that is seriously a pain in the ass. 

Pun not intended 

... 

... 

Bum intended.... Teheehee. 

-_-

Just like you I too have seen dark days when I was so helpless that I didn't even knew what to type in search engine to find a relatable topic. And there was no one to help me. 

I used to ask people on the road, at the pool, in the gym, on Facebook, Twitter, myspace (not myspace) as a desperate attempt to find at least an idea that I want to work on.  Because it's the basic idea that you need and then things unfold themselves as you find different papers based on the topic. 

So finding the correct topic is like hitting a jackpot. It's like finding your soul mate, finding your true potential, finding your inner skills, finding Nemo..

Seriously, what? 

Just got carried away. 

So here I have few practical tips that will actually work while searching a research topic. See how many you can relate to. Go..

1. Use search engines that are specially made for researching, like google scholar or PUBMED (these are the two best according to me). Type random words like amylase, antibacterial activity of..etc. There are heavy chances that you will get a few ideas from here.
2. Ask your immediate seniors, like who completed their project just when you are about to start. If you find their project interesting you can continue with it using additional parameters or anything that they have listed in their future prospects and still it will be your own research. Even if you do not wish to continue with their's, at least you will get your idea and you can search something on similar lines. 
3. Look for books in the library. Our library had a bunch of books that had collections of all the recent research papers, especially the ones that cannot be accessed online.
4. Look up in your theory. Yeah, we have been doing Microbiology all our these years so we can definitely get an idea from there. For eg. one of batchmate was doing her project on antibacterial effects of nano-particles synthesized from different plants, and this idea she got from our theory background on nanotech. Similarly you too can found a hoopla of ideas if you look into your theory. We have studied so many enzymes, their synthesis, production and industrial applications. Go ahead and use them. It works really well. One of my best friend worked on keratinase and it's application in dehairing of goat hide. We have also studied so many biocalcitrant compounds that are hard to degrade by normal micro-organsims, you can use them for your research too.
5. In case you are not much of a research person and you are looking for a small project just enough to fetch you marks, then you can always read the dissertations of the previous students in your college to get a hint on different kind of projects carried out in post grad. You will definitely find your kind of short and sweet project over there.
6. And if you are even lazier and uninterested than the previous category, don't worry. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy, I have a way for that too. One of my friend called her friends in the other colleges and asked what they are doing. And she chose a project that was 90% similar to one of her friend. You can do it too by incorporating some minor changes like adding or removing one or two parameters. Or you can  change the isolate or the source of obtaining the isolate, etc.

That's it for now. I will keep updating as and when I find new ones.

So let's happily start searching for our research topics with a high six.

Lots of love and good luck to you.

-Staph.