Good research is not only about having clever ideas. It is about asking meaningful questions, finding reliable ways to answer them, understanding the evidence deeply, and communicating the results clearly.

A good researcher should gradually develop three abilities:

1. To identify important and answerable questions.
2. To use appropriate methods to investigate those questions.
3. To explain the findings in a way that others can understand, evaluate, and build upon.

How to Pick a Good Research Question

The quality of a research question can be evaluated as a function of three main factors:

Novelty, Feasibility, and Significance

These correspond to three basic questions:

1. Novelty: Do we already know the answer?
2. Feasibility: Can we realistically find the answer?
3. Significance: Does the answer matter?

A good research question usually sits at the intersection of these three dimensions. If a question is novel and significant but not feasible, it may be too ambitious. If it is feasible and novel but not significant, it may not be worth pursuing. If it is significant and feasible but not novel, it may be useful engineering or replication work, but not necessarily strong research.

Novelty: Do We Already Know the Answer?

A research question should not simply repeat what is already known, unless the goal is replication, verification, or application to a genuinely new setting.

To evaluate novelty, ask:

1. Has this question been directly answered before?
2. Has a very similar question been studied in another field or context?
3. Are we proposing a new problem, a new method, a new explanation, a new dataset, or a new evaluation setting?
4. If the work is incremental, is the increment meaningful enough?