Shawn O. Utsey from Virginia Commonwealth University provides insight on how to create a topic in a presentation titled Getting Your Research Published in Peer Reviewed Journals:
Topics should be:
How to select the right topic:
From 5 Tips for Publishing Your First Academic Article from Inquiries Journal.
Say Something New
No journal is going to take interest in your work if it does not present new or novel ideas. To get your work published, you need to say something new without saying something that calls your credibility into question.
Successful academic articles do two things: they position themselves within existing scholarship (often in a ‘literature review’ section, although strategic authors don’t always label it as such) and they subsequently build on existing knowledge.