Can any study answering or finding more about a relavant question be done as a research paper?

Question

Can something like 'How does quantum computing accelerate mathematical modeling ?' OR 'Variation in smartphone radiation with signal strength and age' OR 'High speed object recognition with the HB100 radar module' OR 'Effect of social media on human behavior'

Be published as a research paper ?

I know this is trivial, but most research papers I read had very deep and highly specific topics so I was wondering anything along the lines of the above can become a research paper. (I included these samples above because I thought they were all broad and different kinds of stuff)

Answer 1

A paper is there to answer a question. The problem with broad questions is that they often don't have answers at all, or they have many answers, or that answering them takes more than one book to write up. In any of these cases a paper is not the right format for writing up the results just because of the space limit implicit in a paper.

More seriously, with such a broad question it is very hard to organize your research project and get it done. You'll typically end up doing lots of loosely related things that in the end just don't add up to anything meaningful.

This does not mean that you cannot tackle large problems. It just means that you need to break them up in smaller, more manageable pieces, and tackle those one at the time. Afterwards, you or someone else can write a review or a book that brings the pieces together. Moreover, something like this is often a group effort and not something that is done in one or two years, but rather many years, or multiple decades and for really broad question one could argue the time frame is in terms of centuries.