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 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. For instance, if you are writing about the raid at Harper's Ferry. Think of related keywords:

"Harper's Ferry"
"John Brown"
abolition
"slave uprising"

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.

Boolean Operators

To search multiple keywords at once, you need to use connector terms, also called Boolean Operators. Using a Boolean Operator will tell the database to connect the terms together in your search.

There are three Boolean Operators:

AND: All keywords must appear in your results. AND will narrow down a search.
OR: Either of the keywords must appear in the results. OR will give you more results.
NOT: Excludes certain keywords from your results. NOT will narrow down a search.

Depending on the database you are using, there may be a place to choose which Boolean Operator you want to use, or you may have to type them in with your keywords.

Click on the below tabs to learn more and see examples of Boolean Operators.

AND

AND is the most common of the Boolean Operators. AND will narrow down your search so you get less results, because it is telling the database that your search results must include every one of your search terms.

When you use AND to combine your keywords, keep in mind that while you will get results that have all of your keywords together, they might not necessarily be next to one another.

Examples

"Harper's Ferry" AND raid

"John Brown" AND effects

"John Brown" AND perceptions AND slavery

OR

The Boolean Operator OR broadens your search. Remember that in database searching, OR means MORE results. OR tells the database that you want results that mention one or both of your search terms.

OR is a helpful operator to use if you have a search term that has multiple meanings, like preschool OR nursery school. You will notice when you do your searching, that some authors might use the term "preschool" and others will use "nursery school" to mean the exact same thing. OR helps you make sure that you find the most possible articles about your topic.

Examples

"enslaved person" OR slavery

perception OR effect

"Salem Witch Trials" OR "Salem Witchcraft Trials"

NOT

The Boolean Operator NOT helps narrow your search by excluding certain terms from your search. When using NOT, you are telling the database that you want information that is related to the first term, but not the second.

NOT is useful if one of your keywords has multiple meanings that keep giving you irrelevant results.

Examples

Hedy Lamarr NOT Hollywood

presidential elections NOT United States

dinosaurs NOT extinction

Quotation Marks

Sometimes you may want to search for a phrase (2 or more words) in a database. When you are searching phrases, put quotation marks around the phrase. This will tell the database to search the phrase as a whole, instead of as individual words.

Examples

"common cold"

"primary school"

"community college"

Truncation

Library databases can be very literal when searching. The database is going to search exactly what you type in, but sometimes there can be different variations of the same word, for example, variations of the word "child" could also be "childhood" or "children." That means if you only used "child" as a keyword, you would be missing sources that mention "children" or "childhood."

The way to search all of the variations of a word at the same time is to use truncation. Add a asterisk ( * ) to the root of your word in order to search all the variations of the word.

Examples

abolit* = abolition, abolitionist, abolitionists

impact* = impact, impacts, impacted

Important Note!

Truncation may not work for every word, so you need to be careful about where you put the asterisk ( * ).

For example, wom* will get you woman, women, womb, and wombat! This search might give you some sources you are definitely not looking for.