The process of exploring the indigenous PhD research topic in the Iranian interdisciplinary sciences

The method of choosing the PhD research topic in Iranian interdisciplinary sciences has always been one of the concerns of researchers. Today, the research problems have been resulted from a confusing choice and the topic choice is made mainly by a translational look at the scholarly literature of the other contexts. So, the dialectic of the universal and the particular of research (acquiring global knowledge and then localizing it) have been neglected and the adoption of a methodological basis that can confirm indigenous originality of the research, is overlooked. This study aims at explaining the process of exploring the PhD research topic in Iranian context by adopting a problem-based approach. A five-step methodological framework in defining the PhD research title has been proposed and the proposed model has been used in the case of selecting the topic of Urban Planning PhD research around the general topic of "collective memory". According to the process presented in the paper, research title formulation should pass through the five stages including "Finding the research-worthy problems based on the four-step process (look, read, synthesize and seek feedback)", "Introducing the problems and outlining the concise proposals concerning them", "Evaluating and choosing 2/3 subjects meeting the quadruple criteria (clarity of research questions, research originality and importance, contribution to the knowledge, have a sense of belonging to the subject)", "Seeking key questions by the “method of making conceptual linkage between questions/ concepts”" and "Finally choosing the subject and formulating the research title after an integral synthesis".