As a graduate student in the PhD program (I will be graduating in about 2 months), my research has covered a wide range of topics rather than nailing down one specific topic (super-specialized). In fact, my thesis is broad enough that my current working title is something along the lines of "Toward the Application of Electronic Structure Theory to Solve Relevant Chemical Problems." (Can it get any more general?) There is nothing informative from that title as it completely leaves out details. The problem is, each paper I've published is its own research focus without any connection to the next outside of the fact that computational chemistry was used for each.
I've read in other places that a thesis topic is critical because it is the basis on which you launch your career. Is it bad to look like a 'jack-of-all-trades' person? There must be a better way to handle this.
Answer
short answer: I think the title is not suitable as it is, and thus may harm your career: currently it doesn't look like a jack-of-all-trades, but the title looks like jack-of-no-trade. However, it may not be a problem if you are already comparably well known for your work (i.e. people know jack has his trade(s)).
But I think it would be good to put in some effort to make it more precise about your contribution to the field.
long answer:
Disclaimer: I'm chemist. Not theoretical chemist, but chemometrician which means that I also do calculations (though of a different kind) in order to solve application problems.
I believe my situation is similar to the OPs in that we both work at problems where in order to solve application questions some method needs to be developed further. I call these 2 aspects of my work the "theory" and "application parts of the work.
In my experience you can easily end up with the title of all or most papers emphasizing the application, and thus looking very diverse while the common topic (the theory) is de-emphasized. Several reasons can cause/contribute to this:
- the application problem may be understandable and important to a much wider audience than the small field of experts on the theory you use and advance to solve the application question.
- therefore, the pubications are targeted to journals the application audience reads
- and you do not want to frighten them away by heavy theory terms in the title.
- Also, in my field it is much easier to get funding for working towards the solution of some medical application (and doing the necessary data analysis theory development under that hood) than to get funding for developing data analysis theory (and demonstrating this with the medical application).
And this of course may bleed through to the paper and thesis titles.
In the end, the theory development - thus the common topic of the papers - is mainly to be seen inside the papers. Of course in this situation it would be good to have also a theory paper out that brings together the theory developments and just touches the applications as examples. However, this may look like one more disjoint topic on the first glance.
For example, my publication list has a whole lot of medical application (though I always try to sneak in the theory developments also into the title of the application papers), and a few papers which focus on data analysis methodology - while the common points of all these papers exists: chemometric data analysis and vibrational spectroscopy.
Two more points to consider:
The very general title you give sounds like a typical working title to be put into the forms at the beginning of the PhD before the specific line of the thesis is known. I don't see anything unusual in a situation where at the end of the work this working title is updated by a specific title.
To me, this seems to be the underlying question here.If you are in a theory group or are the one in your group who does theory development, the fact that you actually do theory development may be so obvious that you didn't think of stating it. But the fact and preferrably also the specific type of theory development should be in the title.
So my questions to the OP are:
Does this description of application vs. theory aspects reflect your publication situation?
In particular: by unrelated topics, do you mean something like the application question/chemical problems you solve are unrelated? Or do you mean that neither the chemical problems nor the methods you used to solve them are related?
My recommendation without knowing more specifics is:
Explain to your non-chemist grandma what you've been doing. Make a list of the points.
Fill in the sentence: My papers tackle application problems about ...., but what I've really been doing is ....
Don't be afraid of a long title. My guess is that the working title you posted is shortened too much: as you say it is not informative any more as the specifics have been cut out. Put them in.
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