Paper Topic Ideas

Thinking about animal minds (or what to do when it's all feeling a bit much...)

Usually when I'm looking to find a news item to inspire a paper topic I just look to the front page of a newspaper website and see what catches my interest. Today I tried that and it just felt all a bit too much. The political news has been coming so fast and has felt so overwhelming that it was feeling hard to know what to even focus on for an example for this post! Though it all feels important and I know that there are so many fascinating paper topics we could generate from these headlines, the thought really filled me with dread.  

When it's all feeling a bit much: Focusing on interests

Sometimes mining the headlines for a topic is just NOT what you need. When I'm feeling overwhelmed, I turn back to things I know will give me joy like hobbies or passions or topics that I just find ALWAYS find interesting.

In my case, I love animals and I especially love to think about what it is like to be an animal. What happens in animal minds? For my whole life, I've always liked thinking and wondering about the minds of animals so, in a time of feeling dark and overwhelmed, I gave myself permission to think about what kinds of paper topics could come out of this interest.

So I know I'm on the path away from the barrage of political news but I also know that "animals minds" probably won't work as a topic -- too broad, too vague and, my "assignment" for this blog is to move from news topic to paper topic so I know I'll need to do a little more exploration before I have settled on a topic!

Going back to the headlines with a (happier) focus--and a time limit

This time, instead of turning to the front page, I clicked through the "Science" section on a couple of news websites. I set a timer and scanned headlines for stories that seemed to connect in some way to my broad topic, looking for things that piqued my interest. In 2 minutes, looking at two website (New York Times and NPR), I'd found a few promising articles:

Bromley, Camille. “Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell Us?” The New York Times, 6 Jan. 2025.

Keim, Brandon. “Mother Chimp and Daughter Share a Special Sign.” Nytimes.com, 2025.

Lambert, Jonathan. “Peeing Is Contagious in Chimpanzees, Study Suggests.” NPR, 22 Jan. 2025.

“The Birds’ Guide to Surviving Winter.” Nytimes.com, 2025.

“These Bonobos Know What You Don’t Know.” NPR, 3 Feb. 2025.

I opened all of these articles in new tabs in my web browser and paused, turned off my timer. At this point I probably had about five minutes invested in my search and I paused and asked myself whether my time would be best spent looking for more headlines or checking through a few of these articles to see if there were any promising paper topics hiding in the headlines. I decided to look through them, figuring any more than 5 articles open and I might start feeling overwhelmed.

Mining the articles for topics

I reset my timer and started looking at my articles.  While the article about peeing being contagious in chimps gave me a chuckle and intrigued me, it didn't immediately set off a chain of ideas in my mind about where to go next so I kept moving. The next article I looked at was “Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell Us?” by Camille Bromley. I skimmed the article and could see that the author starts with a personal story of teaching her dog to communicate using buttons coded to talk and then the article goes on to look at the controversy over whether dogs are really communicating when they use these buttons in the way we think they are. Having gone down my own Instagram rabbit hole with these videos a couple years ago, it seemed to me like this article could lead me to some good research questions and I was pretty interested to learn more. I did a quick Google search for "Dogs communication buttons" and scanned the first couple of screens of results. Though there were some lower quality sources like Reddit discussions and a lot of cute videos of dogs using the buttons, there were also a good number of news articles and links to scientific studies. I also learned that the buttons are often called "soundboard buttons". This quick search made me start to feel pretty confident that I'd be able to write a paper on the topic of dog communication using soundboard buttons!  

Twenty minutes in: Should I stay or should I go? Choosing the most researchable topic

Skimming those two articles, doing my quick Google search, and getting distracted by a few cute dog videos had taken me another 15 minutes. I had a pretty good topic in mind: interesting to me and researchable. I still had three more articles opened in my tabs: one about how birds survive the winter, one about a new study of bonobos that suggests that bonobos are interested in human minds (whoa, that's getting pretty meta...), and one about how chimpanzees will develop gestures and sounds that are unique between pairs or families. The chimp story is really interesting to me, as is the bonobo story, and I find I want to read the articles through later, but neither jumps out at me as so immediately researchable as my dog story. Even though my interest is maybe a little bit higher in the ape stories, I decide to stick with my dog communication topic for now.

Search terms and things to look out for

The search terms that worked for me on this search were pretty straightforward:

• dogs
• communication
• buttons
• soundboard
• I also had some luck with throwing in the term "intentional" after looking at a couple of studies (because the studies tend to look at whether dogs are intentional in their use of the buttons).

Unsurprisingly, these searches turned up a lot of cute and interesting videos (fun, but probably not a great use of time in your research process), sites that are selling the buttons (I'd avoid those, any info they are providing is going to be pretty biased), and a lot of discussion forums (maybe some good first-person stories of training a dog but I'd skip those until after I'd found some good solid articles from newspapers, magazines, journals, and other published sources).

Some other research ideas

I imagined a paper that was exploring whether or not dogs are actually intentionally using these buttons to communicate with their people. But some other ideas that came to me included:

• Pet influencers:  Looking at the world of soundboard Instagram/TikTok accounts and at pet influencer accounts more broadly.
• How to: If you had an assignment where you had to describe how to do something, you could talk about how to train a dog to use those buttons.
• Dog communication more generally: You could broaden the topic and look at communication between humans and dogs more generally.

While I have you: A small selection of books I've enjoyed on the subject of animal cognition/animal minds:

Playing Possum by Susana Monsó Publication Date: 2024-10-15	An Immense World by Ed Yong Publication Date: 2023-08-29
Being a Beast by Charles Foster ISBN: 1781255342	Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith Publication Date: 2017-10-17
King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz; Publication Date: 2003-08-27	The Animal Mind by Kristin Andrews Publication Date: 2014-11-19