Formulating Interesting Research Questions

The result is that academic research is perceived as irrelevant and incremental and is rarely read. It should come as no surprise that the academic review process is viewed as flawed. The evaluation and production of new ideas is, at best, an ill-structured problem, and market failure in this process is universally evident. For example, the television and film industries spend billions to develop, evaluate, and distribute new concepts. Publishers search for promising new authors and manuscripts. Advertisers create new images and messages. The success rate for these various efforts is underwhelming. And we the public see only the small percentage of ideas that survive the review and evaluation process. The programming of academic research is unique in that the audience for new ideas also plays the role of producer and reviewer. Thus, unlike television programming where my only option is either to watch or not, I read academic journals, participate in the review process, and occasionally contribute content as an author. In all of these capacities, I am excited by research that is interesting, which I define as research that makes a significant contribution to the body of knowledge. Unfortunately, as a reviewer, I frequently read papers that are not interesting, and even the authors are hard-pressed to clearly articulate the study’s contribution. Thus, although the review process at many scholarly journals may have deficiencies, an equal or greater problem is that many of the submissions at these journals fail to make interesting contributions. With that in mind, I will endeavor to offer suggestions on how to formulate more interesting research questions. The formulation of an interesting research question is a necessary first step to conducting successful research. When this first step is done poorly, the research is doomed to mediocrity. But “being interesting” is a tacit skill that is hard to define or teach (see Davis 1971; Zaltman, LeMasters, and Heffering 1982). We easily recognize when something is interesting (and even more easily when it is not!), but it is difficult to articulate what makes something interesting.