Ingram Library-Research Tutorial for ENGL1101/COMM1110: Refine Your Topic

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STEP THREE: REFINE YOUR TOPIC

Once you have found some background information you can refine your broad research topic into a narrow, focused topic. The sooner you can develop a broad subject into a focused topic, the sooner you can shape your research into a final product.

On the other hand, if your subject is too focused or detailed, you may have a hard time finding enough sources. In this case, you will need to broaden your topic.

Narrowing A Topic
A topic that covers too much material is a common problem for students. Depending on your interests, a general topic can be focused in many ways. If you are having trouble narrowing your topic, consider the following questions:

What do you already know about the topic?

Is there a specific time period you want to cover?

Is there a geographic region or country on which you would like to focus?

Is there a particular aspect of this topic that interests you? For example, public policy implications, historical influence, sociological aspects, psychological aspects, specific groups or individuals involved in the topic.

Broadening a Topic
Topics that are too narrow are fairly simple to fix. You can broaden the scope of your topic by:

Lengthening time periods
Increasing specific geographic areas
Adding specific people or interest groups
Altering the focus of the subject, or discipline.

In addition, sometimes a topic may be too recent and sources to your research questions may not yet exist. If that is the case you may have to expand your topic to include the broader issue.

State Your Topic as a Question.
By posing your topic as a question you can more narrowly define what aspect of the topic you want to write about or what position you want to take.

For example, if you are doing research about the use of alcoholic beverages by college students, you might pose the question:

"What effect does the use of alcoholic beverages have on the health of college students?"

It's important to have more than one idea and to be flexible - you may have to narrow, broaden, or even change your topic as you move through the research process.

Identify the Main Concepts or Keywords in Your Question
At this stage, identify the main concepts or keywords in your question or thesis statement, and formulate your search query. The "query" is the translation of your research question or thesis statement into keywords or phrases that the index or database you search will understand.

Using the above assignment topic, the keywords are:

alcoholic beverages

health

college students

Identify Synonyms and Alternate Keywords
Once you have identified the keywords in the question you formulated, you may want to check a dictionary or thesaurus, for synonyms and antonyms for these topic keywords, to develop a list of alternate words which you can use in your search. It may help to chart out the words you find. Using the above assignment topic, we could use the following alternate keywords:

KEYWORDS	ALTERNATE KEWORDS
alcoholic beverages	alcohol
	liquor
	drinking
	binge drinking
	beer
health	illness
	sickness
	disease
	alcoholism
	death
college students	undergraduates
	university
	campus

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Last Modified: 10 August 2005