Finding a research topic

As discussed below, we need to base our research on existing research. That means we need to find a topic that other people have recently been researching, and look at their work.
It may be that what we would like to research is simply not in the current research literature. This can happen with software technologies or products. We would like to know more about them, apply them to new situations or take them further. But it won't count as research unless we can find a group of researchers who think it does. This seems a bit like chicken-and-egg - how does a new topic get started?
Maybe we need to find an angle that is in the current research. A good place to start for this is Google Scholar (under more> in the main Google search pages). Search for your idea there and look at the sort of documents that Google Scholar provides.
Now be careful: Google Scholar is a great start, but it contains many things that are not research papers. Watch out for things that seem to be in the academic community and look for how academic researchers describe topics that might be relevant to your line of enquiry.
Try limiting your search to recent documents (since 2006, say).
The next step is to access The Web of Knowledge (http://www.isiknowledge.com/).
All researchers use this. To use it, you need to access it from your university, or from home with your Athens or Shibboleth login. You can use it to review your own publications, to see which publications are sensible to publish in, find the very latest research and see who is working on it.
From there you can go to researcherid.com, which can help you to create a research profile online, identifying all your own publications. Best of all, if you have a research track record you can see how many times your papers are being cited (and by whom): nowadays this is the final measure of your standing in the research community.
You can search for articles by title, content, authors etc. This will all take you a while but don't give up. Everything you need for research is guaranteed to be there somewhere. If you can't find it at first, go back and read the notes above: if it counts it will be there, but you may need to use different words to describe the area of interest.