Spend some time thinking about which questions you will address in your paper. If you need help narrowing your topic, consider:
While generating your topic, think of keywords that describe your topic - we will use these when searching, not full sentences or questions.
For some students, it helps to draw a mind map to help brainstorm. See the link below for more information.
If you are not too familiar with your topic (e.g. community or issues they are facing; what is popular in culture right now) you may need to read some background or reference sources, as well as social media and websites.
We encourage students to start with a topic and do some research to see what literature exists before choosing their research question and thesis. Most of us are not experts yet, so we encourage you to be flexible with the answers you are looking for. For example, if you are researching how social media influences the mental health of teenagers you want to be aware that there may be positive and negative examples. If you try to search only for the negative outcomes of using social media (anxiety, depression, etc.) then you will be missing potential areas of research. Additionally, we encourage you to wait to create a question and thesis until you have done the research and found evidence. It will be much easier than trying to do this at the start of your project.
You do not need to have a research question or thesis prepared before you start your research. This will become clear as you review the sources.
Searches in Google will work if you type in the entire question "?" but if we were to type in the whole question into the library search - it would not be very effective. Keywords are the individual words and phrases from your topic sentence or research question that we will use in the library search to find academic articles. The more keywords you add to the search, the more focused/narrow your search will be. We encourage you to start out with one or two keywords to see what literature exists on your topic, then add in more keywords to narrow your search.
Research is a science because we can follow a series of steps to achieve a result, but it is also an art because we all use different vocabulary. Part of learning a discipline at university is learning what terms researchers in that area use to describe their work. Technology is pretty good at finding related terms when we use keywords in a search, but sometimes we can try a search and not much comes up. If this happens, reflect on the keywords you have chosen - are there synonyms that describe the same concept? For example, some of us may use the term 'youth' or 'teens', but in much of the literature this age group is referred to as 'adolescents'. Doing some background reading (perhaps via Google or in a book) may also give you some of the preferred terminology for a discipline.
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Before moving ahead with your research, take some time to think about your topic (brainstorm/create concept maps) and narrow it to a topic you can focus on for this assignment. |