The very first step in any research project is developing a topic and question to be answered. The resources below give some helpful tips and tricks to ensure that your topic is not too broad or narrow. And don't forget to make sure you pick something that's interesting to you!
Once you have your question, the research begins! Understanding how to develop and use keywords will be helpful to you throughout your academic and professional careers because effective use of keywords can help you find more or less resources, depending on how specific your keywords are.
Finally, understanding how to use boolean operators, phrase searching, truncation, and wildcards to further expand or narrow your results, will significantly reduce the amount of time spent searching for the perfect resources!
Often, when beginning research, the topic is too broad. In those cases, think of the 5 Ws to help you narrow your topic.
Let's look at the topic of leadership strategies. This topic is too broad or general to write a short paper on, so we need to think of ways to make it more narrow or specific.
Think about who you would like to focus on in your research. You could look at age, race, gender, ethnicity, profession, etc.
You have now generated a new topic "leadership strategies of CEOs."
Think about what you would like to focus on in your research. For example, you might be focusing on a certain type of leadership such as legitimate, transactional, or transformational leadership skills.
You have now generated a new topic "transformational leadership strategies of CEOs."
Think about when you would like to focus on in your research. This could be a time frame or a specific period in time. For example, you might focus on historical leadership theories, current leaders, or leadership strategies during WWII.
You have now generated a new topic "transformational leadership strategies of emerging CEOs."
Think about where you would like to focus on in your research. Perhaps you're interested in learning the workplace culture in another country, or maybe you want to focus on small businesses or non-profits.
You have now generated a new topic "transformational leadership strategies of emerging CEOs in America."
Think about why this topic is significant. Usually this will come down to outcomes, impacts, treatments, causes, etc. For a topic like this you might be focused on employee satisfaction or company turnover as your "why."
You have now generated a new topic "How transformational leadership strategies of emerging CEOs in America impact production output."
When you've answered all of your questions, you may find that your topic is now too narrow, but you can mix and match the keywords that you've established to come up with a good topic. Remember to have fun with it!
When developing your research question, always be mindful that the type of paper you're writing, even for the the same general topic, will influence the keywords you choose when searching for books or articles. Using the example of "Nuclear weapons" below, think about what other keywords you would use for each of the paper types.
Adding the terms statistics or data will help you find tables and charts on your topic.
