75+ Possible subjects for your research paper

What is worse, to have a research paper topic made mandatory, or to be given the assignment to choose your own? Psychology confirms a counterintuitive truth:  more choice isn’t always preferable. One would think that more choice would be liberating, allowing you to customize your experience. 

But no, the opposite is true. People experience a sort of paralysis of choice, caused by so much uncertainty. If you are a student who was given the option to select his topic for a research paper, you may be scratching your head and not knowing what to pick. 

This article is meant to give you some research paper ideas, and at least narrow your list of choices from infinity, to less than 80. 

We will be splitting the ideas, based on their general category. Of course, these topics to research are just the beginning. It’s up to you to dig further and write an excellent paper. 

Religion and Philosophy

You can find ideas for research papers online here. As long as there will be humans, they will wonder about our purpose, ethics, beauty, and so on. 

1. What are First Principles – the reason is not a bottomless pit. At the start of any thought process, there is a statement that is held to be self-evident 
2. How to construct an argument
3. Reason and its blindspots – Explain the notion that reasoning is a method, and it can be applied to incorrectly
4. Metaphysics – if everything can be explained by physics, what explains the laws of physics themselves?
5. What is freedom – analyze the modern conception of freedom, vs how the Classics viewed freedom. 
6. Is Materialism true? – Materialism is the philosophical trend that believes in a reality constructed only from matter and energy. 
7. How much does a thought weigh? – go into the immaterial nature of thoughts, and how knowing the brain, doesn’t necessarily mean that you know the mind. 
8. Virtues – In our multipolar world, is there such a thing as universal virtue that needs to be pursued?
9. Subjective vs Objective – is there a “right” way of doing things, or does it just depend on opinion and perspective?
10. What is Consciousness? 
11. Does something survive death?
12. Stoicism and its parallels in Eastern Mysticism 
13. Do animals “believe” – can animals have religion? 
14. What are humanity’s most primitive forms of religion? 
15. Why has religion always been with us? 
16. Effects of faith in our personal lives. 
17. Miracles in the modern world – research miracles honestly, and present the case
18. Nihilism – Look at the philosophical school of thought, but also at the generalized attitude of meaninglessness that modern people suffer through. 
19. How the use of religious items such as praying hands religious figurine affect our faith
20. Meditation and what it unlocks 
21. Effects of psychedelic drugs 
22. Christianity’s Origins 
23. Islam’s origins
24. Judaism’s origins 
25. How the Church shaped Europe
26. The Great Schism of 1054
27. Orthodox Christianity – a relatively unknown religion that some say is the original Christianity 
28. The Catholic origins of the University System and Academia
29. Socrates – the first philosopher/ the gadfly 
30. Plato – The Jaded Master
31. Aristotle – shaping a millennium – talk about Aristotle’s influence not only in his own time i.e tutoring Alexander the Great, but also laying the foundation of modern European culture and science
32. What’s a Pope, and what does he do? 
33. Is the world getting more, or less religious? 

History

When you are scrounging for ideas and you need some research paper writing help, you can always rely on history to prove a massive number of topics. 

1. Is the “Out of Africa” theory true? – present the arguments and counterarguments. 
2. The lifestyle humanity was made for; hunter-gatherer.
3. The fertile crescent- Go through the first recorded use of agriculture and settled living in the Middle East
4. First city-states – Look at the earliest cities and nations known to man, located in today’s Iraq
5. The Hero’s journey – look at the archetypal story, the hero’s journey. From Gilgamesh to Luke Skywalker 
6. Write that down! – a history of writing and language 
7. Egypt – the kingdom along the Nile
8. Greeks and their political organization 
9. The Persian Wars – go through the Persian Empire’s attempt to conquer Europe 
10. Cyrus the Great – One of history’s lesser-known great men 
11. The Peloponnesian war – the civil war amongst Greek city-states that in many ways mirrors our modern political tendencies. 
12. Greek institutions and culture
13. Alexander the Great and his conquests
14. The Iliad and Odyssey. 
15. A rising star; The early days of the Roman Kingdom 
16. No more crowns: the ascension of the Roman Republic 
17. Strife and Oligarchy – the last days of the Republic
18. The First Punic War
19. Elephants across the Alps – Hannibal’s campaign against Rome
20. Crossing the Rubicon – Caesar lays the groundwork for the Roman Empire
21. From Octavian to Caesar Augustus – go through the rise of the first Roman Emperor 
22. Cleopatra – the lover of both Caesar and Marc Anthony that shaped the course of human history 
23. Constantine the Great – the first Christian emperor. 
24. Trouble from the East – make a generalized presentation of the population that started to migrate from the East to the territory of the Roman Empire. This is one of the best research paper topics, given that few people ever cover this phenomenon. 
25. The fall of Rome – present the fall of Rome through the perspective of the Romans
26. Rome’s end. Tragedy, or sigh of relief? – go through the fact that by the end, Rome grew bloated with taxes, social problems, and collapsing institutions. The barbarian invasions hit the “Reset” button.
27. The Dark Ages were not so dark – Argue that the term “Dark Ages” was just a propaganda term that stuck. The Middle Ages saw an enormous amount of invention and innovation. 
28. The first crack appears: Luther’s reformation – how the Protestant Revolution was the first sign of European’s cultural hegemony
29. The 30-years war – One of Europe’s greatest mistakes 
30. The First World War – use this topic only for longer papers. You can look at the series of massive mistakes that shattered a civilization. Every other atrocity and mistake in the 20th and 21st centuries has its roots here
31. The Spanish Flu – adding disease to injury – is topical, considering our current predicament. 
32. The Second World War – how three ideologies ( Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism) were fighting for what was left of Europe. 
33. The Crusades – were they unjustified aggression or a response to 700 years of Islamic attack? 
34. The French Revolution – How a noble uprising devolved into a slaughter of innocents 
35. The American Revolution – How the French Revolution should have turned out. 
36. The Age of Exploration – Magellan, Vasco da Gama, and Columbus 

Technology 

Humans are not the fastest or toughest things in nature, but we compensate via technology. It also provides an almost infinite list of research topics. 

1. The Windmill – the first step towards industry 
2. The Steam Engine – harnessing the power of coal and using the steam engine to make transportation and shipment possible 
3. The Internal Combustion Engine – entering the age of speed
4. Balloons and Zeppelins – how media hysteria ended one of the most promising and efficient methods of air travel. 
5. Computers – converting reality into Boolean math 
6. Smaller and better – how silicone allowed us to shrink computer chips 
7. Internet – document the start of the web 
8. Effects of technology on the developing mind – an honest look at the massive positives but also the negatives of growing up with the Internet. 
9. Social Credit system- analyze the push to introduce surveillance and social credit systems using the Internet. 
10. Growing vertically – how we can build farms vertically, causing less damage to the environment
11. Electric cars; Hype or a real alternative? – honestly analyze electric cars, and how they indeed pollute less than the alternative. However, also mention that the making of their batteries is an environmental catastrophe. 

Conclusion 

Any of these topics, if properly researched and analyzed, will get you a top grade. Be sure to select something that you care about, as this will make you more likely to write a quality paper. While you couldn’t find some ready-made research paper online here, these ideas should get you started on the right path.