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 so far.

Depending on your topic, you should think about some of these questions:

Was the trial just or unjust? What factors might have affected the trial?

For cancel culture, pick a single event to focus on. Did cancel culture deliver or undermine justice in that situation? How?

For your current issue or system, choose a single example of that issue. How does this aspect of society promote or undermine justice?

Is there more than one side to this issue? What are the opposing viewpoints on it?

Think how you can discuss the issue in your paper and consider what arguments you might want to make.

Keywords

Sometimes these trials or events can be difficult to search for. Information about them can be found by searching the victim's name, the defendants' name(s), or sometimes by a nickname the trial is often known by (for example, the Scottsboro Boys Trial or the Lindbergh Baby Trial). You should try all of these ways of searching for information, especially if you're not finding enough sources. However, be careful when you're searching the trial names - sometimes less is more, and often including the word 'trial' limits your search results drastically.

For instance, here are three different searches in EBSCO eBook Collection.

Scottsboro Boys Trial - 0 results

Scottsboro Boys - 8 results, but they don't look that good

Scottsboro - 20 results, and they look like better results

Here's another example:

Samuel Sheppard Trial - 0 results

Sam Sheppard Trial - 1 result, looks relevant

Sam Sheppard - 17 results, all look pretty good

Also keep in mind some trials have a lot more information written about them than others.

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.