As Tanya recently pointed out, sometimes you have to go down a research path just to find out if the path is of interest to you, sometimes having to backtrack. The UT School of Info had a little seminar which addressed this, at least on a community level. The Research-A-Palooza:

• Each person gets 90 seconds to describe one of his/her research threads, accompanied by one PowerPoint slide.
• When I change the slide to introduce the next person, you have 10 seconds to finish up.
• If you find me rude, please get over it.

Original powerpoint (10 megs!) and crude HTML rendering