Nature Network blogger Ricardo Vidal blogged about ‘how does one decide what to study about’. This is exactly the question I think the most everyday. Although I still cannot figure out the answer so far, I do have some points that might be helpful.

First, read as many papers as possible. What else can you get by reading papers besides knowing what’s going on in the field?

1. To notice some pioneers of this field, (who are frequently cited in the Introduction sections of many articles) and learn how they entered this field initially by referring to their works chronologically. Also visit their group websites and know what projects (i.e. the larger scopes) do their papers actually belong to. Then you may switch from the paper-thinking to a project-thinking – consideration of a large project rather than one or two papers. I believe this switching is important for junior students because as a researcher in the future you will have to apply for your fund by your proposal of a project rather than some papers. But as a student now I still have no idea of project but tend to appreciate someone who is able to publish his/her works on Nano Lett., ACIE, JACS, Phys. Rev. Lett., etc. However a project is definitely not one or two (nor a dozen even you can) ACIE or Nano Lett. papers but more likely a pile of Macromolecules, Langmuir, Polymer or J. Polym. Sci. (I’m talking in the context of polymer study but the meaning is the same in other fields). ACIE papers are more like some lucky by-products of a larger goal.
2. To know different understandings of different authors of this field. You may find that papers doing the same thing may have totally differently written Introduction sections. Aiming for different problems and starting from different approaches, the same field of study may mean quite distinctively to different scientists. By reading many papers you can have all these understandings in mind, getting rid of the ‘problem-solving’ thinking (which is like ‘oh this paper said there are still such problems to solve so I may try solving them’) and finally realize what this field of study as a whole really means and implies for a far future.

Second, from time to time, try to set a further goal for a certain field than what one or two papers can reach, and fill the gap with a series of smaller problems to solve (just pretend like you have to do so). If you are able to set a far goal, maybe you need to first divide the project into multiple steps then filling those steps with smaller goals/problems to reach/solve. I believe that practice thinking this way may help me in PhD study in the future. However, one should not fill the gap with casually-thought-of steps. Instead, these steps should be carefully conceived. Let me talk with more details about this.

To have the ability of solving the problems you have to (again) read as many papers as possible, may be of a wide range of fields. If a problem has not been solved up till now, rarely is it because people haven’t notice the problem (remember that you are always slow). It is still now unsolved only because people haven’t yet figured out an approach to it or their approaches just failed. Sometimes the word ‘approach’ means ‘strategy’, and rely on your clever design. You must be more clever than other to have the problem solve (which is hardly the case of people like me but of those like…F. Stoddart?); but sometimes the word also means ‘technique’, so findings of other fields may be suitable for implementation as a new technique to solve your problem, and obviously the larger your breath of knowledge the more likely that you have a new key to the answer (e.g. a combination of/third way besides top-down and bottom-up approaches toward nano-architectures). So you just have to know more than others to solve what they haven’t been solved yet, something one can reach by hardworking (instead of IQ, I have low IQ…). Certainly a clever strategy plus a new technique is the best if you can, and quite sometimes these two aspects interweave with each other.

However there is a limit of reading papers. If something obviously very necessary is not done, it must be due to some universal obstacles that you, no matter how intelligent you are (it is just not the point), cannot avoid. But these obstacles are seldom disclosed in published papers because most papers are describing what is and why it is successfully been done rather than the opposite. Only those ‘insiders’ of the field know the secret reason why something easy-looking is not done. And for you being an ‘outsider’, one of the worst situations is finding your idea relying on a ‘key step’ which in fact is currently impossible to achieve. So the you have to be interactive (or nucleophilic, chemically speaking) and ask some of the insiders for suggestions, although they don’t always reply to such questions (in this case they may be nucleophiles and you have to be more electrophilic instead, technical issue indeed). Alternatively, you can also test the key techniques by yourself in the lab and see if they can be (easily) repeated. In a word, you have to confirm the feasibility of the techniques you are going to rely on in the key steps of your project.

After you have constructed a project with quite detailed and feasible steps, it is left to your hardworking lab hours to finally accomplish the project.

Due to my limited language skill I have talked with a definite tone, but in fact all of the above is totally the imagination of me, a junior beginner in scientific research. I hope the many experienced professors here can leave their invaluable advices on this topic.