Once you have read and understand your assignment, it’s time to choose a topic. Sometimes instructors will have a pre-approved list of topics for you to choose from, but other times you may need to come up with a research topic on your own.
Whether you need to write a research paper, give a speech or presentation, or complete another type of assignment, you will need to choose and focus your research topic.
If you need to come up with a topic idea on your own, you may want to browse current events in the news, or consult your textbook for issues related to the course that you can investigate further. If you search for one word or a broad topic in library databases, you will likely receive too many, and many unrelated results. Ask yourself what you want to know more about with the topic, and begin to form keywords or search terms. For example, in psychology, instead of searching for anxiety as a disorder, you could narrow the search to:
anxiety and youth and trauma
Using AND between your keywords tells the database you want results that have all three terms in them. This step is one way you can narrow your search to aspects of the topic you find most relevant.
