For any university student, either undergraduate or post graduate, to complete a degree program, it is required that a research work is carried out. From experience, just about all of them are recycled works gotten from various sources like textbooks, journals and the internet.
I have always wondered whether new ideas and breakthroughs are ever gotten from these works mostly because of their nature. Is the reasoning behind these works to get new ideas or just to practice how a research is carried out?