Check with your instructor if you have any questions or concerns.
If you haven’t yet decided what topic you want to research and write about, start with a simple topic search on the internet.
Add your area of study to the phrase “research topics in” and read through the results.
For example: research topics in english or research topics in literature
Once you decide on a topic, express your topic or research question in a sentence. This will help you narrow down some key words for your search strategy.
For example:
I want information on the political significance of the Franco-Prussian War.
I need to know about the market for hockey sticks in Canada.
I want to compare communism with democracy.
Figuring out the right size of topic can be a challenge – you don’t want it so big that you’ll need to write a book to cover it, and you don’t want it so focused that no information is available. A quick look at a reference source like an encyclopedia (Wikipedia is ok!) can help you get an idea of how big a topic is. EBSCO’s Research Starters which can be found using OneSearch are also a great resource for this.
*** Remember that your instructor is your best resource for checking that your topic is appropriate! ***
Having a research strategy can help you approach your research in an organized way. In step 1 you wrote out your research question. Identify keywords from your research question:
Example: “I want information on the political significance of the Franco-Prussian War.”
Keywords: “Franco-Prussian War”, “political significance”, "politics"
Find more keywords using reference sources:
The research starter on the Franco-Prussian War mentions that this war contributed to the political unification of Germany. “German unification” and “Germany unification” are keywords we can try.
The Wikipedia page for Franco-Prussian War lists Otto Von Bismarck as a major political figure involved in the conflict, so we can try adding “Otto Von Bismarck” as a keyword.
Armed with our list of keywords we can now do some searching using the resources identified in Step 2. Keep in mind that searching is a process and revising your search terms and trying new search terms is part of it.
Some of the phrases I’d search for this research question are:
“Franco-Prussian War” <- start very broad and if there are lots of results start narrowing your search with additional keywords.
“Franco-Prussian War” AND “political significance”
“Franco-Prussian War” AND “politics”
“Franco-Prussian War” AND “German unification”
“Franco-Prussian War” AND “Germany”
“Franco-Prussian War” AND “Otto Von Bismarck”
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Example:
Both methods can retrieve good results, but if you are looking for keywords in a specific order using "" will return better results. |
Search Tip: