Topics!

Eugene Volokh writes:

The UCLA Law Library and I have put together http://www.lawtopic.org, a Web-based clearinghouse for student article ideas. The theory is that law professors, lawyers, law clerks, and judges would submit such ideas to this site, and students would pick up those ideas.

What a timely idea -- and one that deserves to be expanded beyond the confines of law.

Volokh goes on to explain why this is a win-win situation, but the reasons are clear to anyone who's been in the research business for any length of time. When you are a grad student (or advanced undergraduate), energy and research time are in relatively plentiful supply. The problem is in finding good research topics: when you are new to a field, you don't know where the gaps are, and even when you do come up with what looks like a good topic, you may find it has been covered before or is being worked on elsewhere -- not to mention the possibility that it is either a dead end or just too ambitious.

Fast forward a few years, and the landscape has shifted. You've finished a dissertation, published articles, maybe written a book or two. One line of inquiry has opened up another, opening up another, and another; you are in regular contact with your professional peers, so you all have a good idea of what is being worked on and what needs working on -- but now that you are earning a living you can't spare a fraction of the time needed to delve into this proliferation of topics. Sometimes they end up getting handed down from teacher to student (the degree to which this happens is a significant measure of a professor, both as a teacher and a researcher), yet too often they do not: for not all researchers are teachers, and not all teachers have students interested in doing research of their own. Topics, anyone?

Posted by David on July 27, 2006 3:49 PM