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.

Ask yourself:

What aspect of the criminal justice system and policing do I want to focus on?

What interests me about the criminal justice system?

What do I want to write about?

As you start to narrow this down into a topic, 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. For instance, if you are writing about Miranda's rights, you will want to think of related keywords:

Miranda's rights
Miranda's rights AND history
Miranda's rights OR Miranda warning
Right to remain silence NOT pleading the 5th
Miranda vs. Arizona

You can combine "Miranda's rights" with some of your search terms to find articles connecting the two ideas. Unlike Google, library databases work best using connector terms, such as AND, OR, and NOT.

AND	OR	NOT
AND means you are searching both terms together Searching Miranda's rights AND history will get you results related to BOTH Miranda's rights AND history	OR gives you more results. OR tells the database that if you wanted information about Miranda's rights OR Miranda warning, since those could be used interchangeably.	NOT excludes terms from your search. Searching Right to remain the silence NOT pleading the 5th will give you results that are related to the right to remain silence. but will exclude any articles mentioning pleading the 5th .

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.