If you are an undergraduate student and planning to do a research project, or if you are planning to do postgraduate studies, you may have wondered about what kind of research project you should do. You may have asked yourself, should I go for a basic (fundamental), clinical or translational research project? Should I do a project that involves sophisticated technology or something that is easier to master and generates faster results? In this post, I will discuss what types of research projects there are and what are, based on my own experience, the pros and cons of the various project types.

 

The first thing one has to do in scientific research is to define a research question. Often this is done by your supervisor, but in some labs you may also be able to choose your own research question. What research question someone chooses can depend on various factors, such as personal interest and track record as well as available expertise and resources. Other important factors for some researchers are whether the research question has the potential to develop into a long-term research programme and help the investigator to develop a track record in a rapidly evolving new area of research. Another important consideration is whether the research question is likely to attract research funding from grant agencies.

 

We can divide research questions fundamentally into two categories, need-driven (or needs-driven) research and curiosity-driven research. As the name suggests, the goal of need-driven research is to address a certain need or gap. For instance, one may want to come up with a new diagnostic test to detect or monitor a disease. Or a researcher may want to develop a novel therapeutic approach or identify a novel drug target for a disease, or identify gene mutations that are responsible for a genetic disease. Need-driven research is notnecessarily translational research, because when you start your project there is nothing to translate, yet. (“Translate” means to apply what you have discovered or developed to be used in the clinic or to be commercialised.) In other words, without having developed a proof of concept for a new diagnostic assay, identified a new therapeutic approach, drug target or disease mechanism, there is nothing to translate. Of course, in some cases you may “inherit” a lead from apredecessor in the lab, who for instance may have found that a specific enzyme is involved in a disease and now you want to identify inhibitors of this enzyme. In this case, your project is both need-driven and translational.

 

And then on the other side there is curiosity-driven research. This type of research is also often called blue sky research. So you ask questions like, why is the sky blue, or   say, how does the proteasome recognise polyubiquitinated proteins, etc. These are basically questions that are interesting to the person who is asking them (and hopefully to others, too). But they have no obvious applications in the short or medium term and they are not addressing a specific need.

 

What are the pros and cons of need-driven and curiosity driven research projects? When our project addresses a specific need, there is the tendency to think that therefore the research must be more important and significant. However, that is not necessarily the case. Think for instance of the countless discoveries in science that served no specific need but that had huge implications to treat human diseases or promote economic growth (think discovery of the genetic code, of protein structure, epigentic gene regulation etc.).

 

Furthermore, both types of research projects can be equally interesting and exciting. This is because whether we are interested or passionate about something is not really dependent on knowing that we are helping to solve an important problem. Rather than this, we feel passionate about projects to which we are emotionally attached. Think of some hobby you have or something you like to do, like playing an instrument or doing sports. You are not primarily doing it because it is important for your mental and physical well-being. You most likely do it because you enjoy it, or because you want to achieve mastery. The same is true of research projects.

 

Me in 2002 in the lab at UCL, very excited about my research question.

 

Both types of research projects can be equally interesting and challenging, but both can also be equally mundane. Whether or not a project is intellectually stimulating is dependent on the specific project itself as well as whether you yourself and your supervisor play their parts to make the work intellectually stimulating. For instance, a project becomes more interesting if you engage in frequent discussions with your supervisor or mentor, and if you contribute to the planning of the project.

 

One difference, however, is that in need-driven research, one really focusses on the need and usually ignores everything that is unrelated to it. On the other hand, in curiosity-driven research, we tend to more frequently stumble across unexpected results or side observations, which can easily become the main project if they look interesting and promising. In fact, many major discoveries started as side observations when trying to answer a different question.

 

Once you have a research question, the next step is to come up with a way to try to answer the question. There are again two potential ways to do this, via hypothesis-driven or hypothesis-generating research. This will be covered in our next post!