After this lesson, you will be able to: Scope a research question that is novel enough, feasible on your budget, and the right size for an SRW paper, and find a mentor.
The hardest research skill is picking the right question. Too big and you cannot finish; too small and it is not a contribution. This lesson teaches scoping for an SRW-sized result and how to get mentorship.
Three tests. Novelty: it is not already answered (your literature review tells you). Feasibility: you can actually run it on free/cheap GPUs in a few months. Interest: someone in the field would want to know the answer. SRW papers are short, so the right size is one sharp question, not a system. Good shapes: 'Does method X, claimed for task A, also help task B?' 'Is the reported gain of X robust to Y?' 'A simple baseline matches X at a fraction of the cost.' 'Here is a failure mode of X and why.' Small and sharp beats broad and shallow.
You do not have to do this alone, and at SRW you are not expected to. Paths: a professor or grad student at your institution (even cold-emailing one whose paper you reproduced, with a specific, prepared question, works more often than students expect), the SRW mentorship program itself (accepted authors get a senior mentor; some years offer pre-submission mentorship), online communities, and your reproduction's original authors (researchers often respond to a thoughtful, specific question about their work). A mentor mostly helps you scope and avoid known pitfalls, which is exactly where first-time researchers struggle.
Picking a question so broad it cannot finish (the classic first-paper failure). Picking one so narrow it is not a contribution. Choosing a topic with no feasible evaluation on your hardware. Not checking novelty thoroughly, then discovering the question was answered last year. Trying to invent a brand-new method instead of doing a clean reproduction-plus-extension. Working in total isolation when a 20-minute mentor conversation would have caught a fatal flaw early.
Pick the best reason.
Sign in and purchase access to unlock this lesson.