The process of picking a topic and finding supporting research is a trap. At the best you engage in a high degree of confirmation bias, seeing only the information that supports your premise.
I remember in college many times writing a paper only to find near the end that the research was pointing in a different direction.
It would be better to start with a hypothesis and then see where the research takes you.
If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement
Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking (p. 6)
