3. Narrow Your Topic

Once you've done some initial background reading, it's time to think about searching for more information on your topic. Remember your assignment requirements and consider what you've read thus far.

As you start to narrow down your topic, you'll want to continue to look for more sources. In order to help you find related sources about your topic, you'll want to identify keywords to help you search.

Keywords

As you think about what information you should include in your paper, think about what particular words might be found in a good article about that topic. Think of related keywords:

nursing
nursing attitudes
nursing professionalism
nursing characteristics

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.