Personalized Learning: Library Services and Help

Having the freedom to select ANY TOPIC you want for your paper or presentation is exciting as well as a bit terrifying.

Choose a topic that:

• interests you
• is appropriate to the assignment
• has previously been written about as you will have to cite sources
• appropriate to the length and depth of the assignment

Complete the choosing a topic tutorial for more assistance.

Do some preliminary research on the topic you've selected.

• Want information on controversial topics or pro/con discussions of issues? Start at CQ Researcher or try ProCon.org
• Want news and insights on a given topic? New York Times Topics
• Want to see how your topic is discussed in scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers? Search Academic Search Complete
• Want to find additional keywords or aspects of your topic? Try looking in Wikipedia or doing a Google Search

Narrowing a topic requires you to be more specific about your research interest and can help you to develop a thesis.

Questions to Help  Narrow Your Topic

• Who? You may want to focus on a specific person/group (women, male college students, infants).
• What? Pick a specific aspect of a topic that interests you.
• Where? Topics can look different in different parts of the country/world, consider choosing a specific geographic area.
• When? While most of your topic will be focused in the present, you may want to consider a historical time period
• Why? Why do you think this is an important/interesting topic?

Complete the Narrowing Your Topic tutorial for additional assistance

Usually your initial idea or topic will be too large for your assignment. It is helpful to know a few things about narrowing a topic into a manageable research question. Creating a concept map is one technique you can use to transform a broad topic idea into something narrower. A concept map is a way to visually display the concepts and relationships among many ideas.

To create a concept map"

• First, write down your main idea
• Next, think of some issues related to your central idea
• Then, for each issue think of sub-concepts that relate to it
• Select the issue that you are most interested in and begin to generate a list of research questions

Here is an example of a concept map on the topic of immigration.

Adapted from Intro to Library Research, University of Minnesota Libraries. To see the full tutorial go to Intro to Library Research