3. Narrow Your Topic

Once you've done some initial background reading, it's time to narrow down your topic to what you really want to focus on. Remember your assignment requirements and consider what you've read thus far. Brainstorm or outline the elements of the topic that you think you want to address.

Ask yourself:

What aspect of the topic do I want to focus on?

What interests me about the topic?

What do I want to write about?

As you start to narrow this down into a topic/thesis, you'll want to continue to look for more sources. As you research, you might tweak or adjust your topic/thesis. In order to help you find more related sources about your topic, you'll want to identify keywords to help you search.

Keywords

As you think about what concepts you want to research, think about what particular words might be found in a good article about that topic.

If you are searching a phrase, put quotation marks around the phrase. For example, if you are writing about "Fossil Fuel"

Think of related concepts to narrow and make your search more specific, such as:

"fossil fuels" AND regulations
"fossil fuels" AND pollution
"fossil fuels" OR oil OR gas AND economy
"fossil fuels" AND green OR clean energy
"fossil fuels" and "Climate change"

When you combine "fossil fuels" with some of your search terms to find articles connecting the two ideas, works best when using connector terms, such as AND or OR.

*Tip: When using connector terms (also called Boolean Operators), remember that AND means you are searching both terms together. Searching "fossil fuels" AND regulation will get you results related to both "fossil fuels" AND regulation.

OR gives you more results. OR tells the database you want information about the green OR clean energy, since those are both similar names for a term.

Keywords work best by trial-and-error. Never do only one search. Some keywords will work better than others, and some keywords may lead you to different articles than you found in your first search. Search the databases with the keywords you selected to find relevant articles. And remember to ask a librarian if you need assistance coming up with keywords or looking for sources
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