Thinking in terms of Debates

In this blogpost, Stephanie shares a tip that has worked for her in her early efforts to write and publish her research. If you are also a student and have tips to share, or problems you want to discuss, send me an email.

I recently had a revelation that may seem obvious to many of you, but it was not obvious to me at the start of my second year of my PhD.

When one of my supervisors asked why I selected my research topic, despite having written a draft of my literature review and research proposal, I found I couldn’t answer this question very well.

How could I spend one year not knowing why I’d selected my topic?

After speaking with more seasoned PhD students, they helped me decipher what my supervisor was really asking: which debates are you speaking to, how does your topic fit into the debates and why should it be added to this debate.

Put another way, doing research is about understanding what issues are being discussed amongst researchers working with that topic (your community). So, by being able to identify the debates around your topic, this helps carve out a research gap (addressing a new problem that is being debated or using a new way to analyze an existing problem) and helps you decide which debate you will contribute to.

Identifying debates will ultimately help sharpen your arguments and improve your ability to explain and motivate why you selected both your research topic and approach. When writing a paper, a presentation of the debates should form the backbone of your literature review. Your contribution to these debates will be what motivates your paper and opens your introduction.

And it is precisely this contribution that will give you the purpose of your article, its centre of gravity, expressed in the title, introduced in the abstract and strengthened in the conclusions.

Good luck!