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 write about. Remember your assignment requirements and consider what you've read thus far.

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 thesis, you'll want to continue to look for more sources. As you read, 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 write about, think about what particular words might be found in a good article about that topic. Unlike Google, our databases search best using brief words or phrases using connecting words, such as and. It helps to surround phrases with quotation marks to tell the computer you are searching for those words as they occur together. For example, if you were writing about Hurricane Katrina and disaster relief efforts, 2 good searches to try would be:

"Hurricane Katrina" and "disaster relief"

"Hurricane Katrina" and rescue

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.