How does one come up with good research ideas? Grad school teaches you a lot about how to pursue them once you have them. You also learn a lot of techniques for evaluating your ideas so you can sift through and find good ones. But are there things you can do to help ensure that your pool of ideas actually includes some good ones?
Seth Roberts, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, has a fascinating essay about how he comes up with good ideas. His system is not for everyone - he obsessively records dozens of measurements of himself and periodically sifts through the data. Because he studies appetite and weight control, he has a lot of opportunities for self-experimentation, and he seems to take them all up: an all-sushi diet, drinking gallons and gallons of water per day, shots of olive oil, and more.
This past weekend I attended the NC Science Blogging Conference where Jean-Claude Bradley from Drexel suggested another interesting approach. He searches Google Scholar for phrases like, "what is needed now", "what is missing is", "there is a pressing need", "what is now needed", "needs to be synthesized", "pressing problem", etc. For example, "there is a pressing need" 2005 chemistry turns up phrases for things that people have identified in (mostly) chemistry papers in 2005 as being important.