Where do Research Ideas Come from?

Finding a valuable and researchable topic can be one of the biggest challenges in research. The literature on applied linguistics research gives some potential sources of research ideas, such as suggestions for further research in published articles and problems in teaching, but these suggestions are given with no evidence that they are the actual sources of successful research studies. This paper attempts to provide such evidence by presenting the findings of a survey of well-known applied linguistics researchers aiming to elicit the sources of their research ideas, together with a summary of my own experiences. Sources of research ideas identified include follow-up and expansion studies on previous research, data-first studies where student work shows interesting features worth investigating, and application of theories or methodologies from other fields into applied linguistics. In addition, the presentation involves the audience in an investigation inspired by one of the sources of research ideas application of a methodology from another field into how research findings influence beliefs.