The topic bank
Thesis topics, with the design and the feasibility written beside them
A title on its own tells you nothing. Every entry in this bank carries the study design it implies, the primary outcome it would be judged on, what your department must already have, how long collection realistically takes, and the single thing that most often derails it.
Topic register · 1064 entries across 24 specialties[6]
- NMC PGMER-2023
- NBEMS 180 days / 26 months
- UGC 2018 · under 10%
- ICMR 2017 · ethics
The register
The register
Browse by specialty
The register, by specialty
Authored by the practice · Not compiled from any list
Each entry opens its own register, where every topic can be filtered by design and by feasibility and read in full. The count beside a specialty is the number of topics published there today.
Medicine and its branches
Clinical profile, outcome and scale-based work, where the register is usually the ward, the OPD and the ICU chart.
Surgery and the procedural specialties
Comparative and interventional work, where the timetable is set by the operating list and the follow-up window.
Diagnostic and laboratory specialties
Accuracy against a reference standard, spectrum studies and resistance profiling, where the reference standard decides the design.
Community, basic and forensic sciences
Surveys, audits, morphometry and autopsy-based work, where access and sampling frame matter more than equipment.
Looking for what a thesis in your field has to satisfy rather than for a question to ask? That is the specialty index, where each entry carries the obligations, the statistics and the questions residents ask first.
Choosing one
Choosing one
Feasibility before novelty
How to choose between them
Two habits, then six questions. The habits are what separate a thesis that finishes from one that is rescued in its last three months.
Habit one
Feasibility before novelty
An interesting question you cannot complete is worth less than an ordinary question answered properly. Decide first whether the study can be done in your unit in the months you have, and only then ask whether it is worth doing. Residents almost always do this in the opposite order, fall in love with a question, and spend the next four months trying to make their department fit it.
Habit two
Caseload before ambition
Your sample size is not a target you negotiate; it is a consequence of the design and the difference you would call meaningful. Read your own department’s register for the last twelve months, subtract the exclusions, divide by the months you have, and see what the arithmetic permits. A three-arm comparison in a unit that sees four eligible patients a week is an arithmetic problem, not an ambition problem.
The six questions a mentor scores a topic against
In the order they kill a topic. A candidate that fails any one of the first five is better abandoned in your first month than in your tenth.
Patient load
Will your own unit produce the participants?
Count from your department’s own register for the last twelve months, then apply your exclusions before you believe the number. An OPD that sees plenty of a condition often yields a fraction of that once prior treatment, age limits and refusal to consent are taken out, and the shortfall shows up in month nine rather than month two.
Ethics
Will your committee approve it as written?
Approval precedes the first participant, not the analysis, and no committee can grant it afterwards[5]. Anything involving children, pregnant women, an intervention with a placebo arm, or a second sample drawn only for research takes longer at the committee and sometimes comes back changed. Read your own committee’s checklist before you write the protocol, not after.
Cost
Who pays for the consumables?
A kit, a reagent, a disposable or an extra investigation per participant is a cost multiplied by your sample size, and the resident usually discovers that it is theirs to pay. If a test is not already done as routine care, get the per-participant figure in writing and multiply it before you commit.
Equipment
Is the instrument in your hospital, working, and available to you?
Three separate questions. A machine that sits in another department, is under repair for two months of the year, or is booked solid for clinical work is not available for a thesis. Where the measurement depends on one person’s skill, ask what happens to your data collection when that person is on leave.
Time
Does collection finish with months to spare?
Work backwards from your submission date rather than forwards from today: analysis, writing, your guide’s corrections and the uniqueness check all sit after the last participant. DNB and DrNB trainees upload the protocol within 180 days of joining and submit by 26 months, inside an 80-page limit[2]. A design that needs a twelve-month follow-up therefore has to start almost immediately.
Novelty
What does a search today actually show?
Scored last, and by you, because it is the one question nobody can answer for you in advance. Run the search yourself — PubMed, then the Indian journals in your specialty — and read what you find before deciding the question is worth asking. A question already asked elsewhere is not automatically a poor thesis, but you must be able to say why you are asking it in your setting.
If you want a second opinion on a topic you have already chosen, ask for a feasibility call. A senior doctor in your field reads it and says plainly where it will not work in the time you have.
The limits
The limits
Read this before you use it
What this bank is not
Six limits, all of them deliberate. A topic bank that does not publish its limits is selling something.
Nothing here is approved by anyone
Not by us, not by a university, not by a board. A thesis topic becomes a topic when your guide and your department accept it, and that decision beats anything written on this page. Where your university ordinance or your board’s format is stricter than anything here, it wins[1].
Novelty is not a property of this list
Whether a question is worth asking in your setting depends on a literature search you run today, in your own field. We do not claim that anything here is unexplored, and you should not repeat such a claim in a synopsis you have not searched for yourself.
No figure here is a result
Each entry is a question and the shape of the study that would answer it. Nothing on these pages states what the literature currently shows, how common a condition is, or how large an effect would be. If you need those for your introduction, they come from papers you read and cite.
The sample figure is a planning range
It is read off the design to tell you the order of magnitude you are committing to, and it is written as a range on purpose. Your number comes from a calculation against your own assumptions, stated in the synopsis beside those assumptions. The sample size calculator is free and does that arithmetic.
Ethics approval is not ours to give
Every prospective entry needs Institutional Ethics Committee approval before the first participant, and most retrospective entries need a documented waiver of consent[5]. A topic you like is not a topic you may start.
You remain the sole author
We mentor, edit and analyse. We do not write theses, and a thesis written by somebody else is misconduct under your own regulations — the one finding that cannot be repaired at the viva[4].
We publish what we refuse to do as openly as what we do. Read the charter, or the guides if you would rather work through the method yourself.
Undertakings
Undertakings
Mechanisms, not promises
What protects your draft, and who owns the work
Each line below is a mechanism this platform implements or a published instrument it is built around. None of them is a guarantee, and we are affiliated with no regulator or university.
Protection of your work
Row-level security
Every table enforces row-level access. You read your own record, and nothing else.
View-only streaming
Drafts are streamed to you through an authenticated route, not handed over as a file.
Watermarked to you
Every page you read carries your own name and email across it.
Download gated
The final file unlocks when the fee is settled in full, and not before.
Mumbai region · DPDP 2023
Your record and your documents are held in the Mumbai region, so India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 applies to them.
Anonymised data only
We accept no patient identifiers. An NDA is available on request.
Instruments we work to
NMC PGMER-2023
The thesis obligations set out in the postgraduate medical education regulations.
NBEMS
DNB and DrNB protocol and thesis timelines, and the page limit, as published.
UGC 2018 · <10%
The academic integrity convention we work to on every draft.
ICMJE · Vancouver
Authorship criteria and reference style, applied as published.
No affiliation
We work to these published instruments. We are affiliated to none of the bodies that issue them.
Authorship and the uniqueness check
Sole author
Mentoring, editing, statistics and compliance. You remain the sole author of your thesis.
Not ghostwriting
We will not write your thesis for you, and we will not be named in it.
MDSoftune
Word-level uniqueness checking, built with REDENN Informatics Inc., Canada.
Every version
Each draft is checked word by word before your university sees it.
MDThesis is an independent academic mentorship practice. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for the NMC, NBEMS, UGC or any university.
Free feasibility call
Tell us where your thesis stands. A senior doctor will tell you what to do next.
A senior doctor replies within one working day. No obligation. MD, MS, DNB, DrNB, DM, MCh, MDS and international programmes.
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Prefer to write to us first? Contact the practice. We mentor and edit; you remain the sole author of your thesis.
Document: Topic bank — index · Revision 1 · Last reviewed
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