The aim of the present study was to explore how physicists start their research studies, how they identify their research questions and what factors influence their involvement in studying a specific research problem. The grounded theory methodology was adopted in the study by considering the qualitative nature of the research questions. The study was completed in two stages. At the initial stage of the study, face-to-face interviews were conducted with physicists to elicit the diversity of their views about the research inception process. At the second stage, an empirically-based multiple-choice survey was prepared on the basis of the themes generated from the responses of the interviewees. 140 physicists working in several Turkish universities completed the survey to reveal how common the diverse views, which were extracted from the interviews, among other physicists. The study results indicated that although physicists started their research studies mostly with a problem, they did not necessarily look actively for a problem when starting a new research study because new problems had already been identified during their previous research. According to the participant physicists, the research inception process was affected by a number of factors related with the available resources and the individual scientist conducting a given research study. These obtained results were discussed in terms of nature of science and nature of scientific inquiry, which are critical issues in science education.