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Research Help: Step 1: Developing a Topic

Tips for researching effectively at your library.

Your Topic

Think about your research topic as a question that you want to answer.  Even if the topic has been assigned, there are things you can do that will make it relevant and interesting to you.

Ask Yourself the 5 W's

How do you turn it into a research question?  Ask yourself these questions:

  1. Who?
    1. Who is this important to?  A person, a group of people, an organization.  A group of people of a certain age?  
    2. Who does this affect?  Scientists, researchers, politicians, farmers, children?
  2. What?
    1. What issue are they facing? Poverty, global warming, pilot shortage
  3. Where?
    1. Where is or did this happen?  A country, state, region, or place like a prison or college?
  4. When?
    1. When did this happen? A specific time period, a season, a future prediction?
  5. Why?
    1. Why is it important?

Adapted from Lesson Plans by K. Kelly and L. Weller licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Brainstorm

Brainstorm by writing down what you already know about the topic.  Let that guide you to find out what you don't know.

Try mind mapping.Mind Map

Image by Biljana Jovanovic from Pixabay

where you start with a central idea and then link different ideas to it.

Developing Your Topic

Background Research

Dive into a subject-specific encyclopedia.  These are written by experts in the field and will provide a good overview of the topic.  This can also give you terms to start thinking about using in a keyword search.

Our library has an excellent collection that you could use to start.

Developing Keywords

Having good keywords will help you along the way.  Start by dissecting your research question.

Ex. What role does exaggeration play in humor?

If this were the starting topic, then keywords would be: exaggeration, humor

However, that's not enough.  Think about the 5 W's.  What terms did you discover in exploring them? Add those in as keywords as well.

Use a thesaurus to help you find more keywords. Why?  Well, there are many different ways to describe something, and having synonyms will lead you to resources you might otherwise miss.