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Quinebaug Valley Campus Library

Quinebaug Valley ENG 1010 Composition

Narrowing Your Topic

If you are researching a topic that you are not familiar with, you can use our reference materials to learn more about your topic.  Simply search for your broad topic in one of these databases and then begin a more narrow search when you find the area of the topic that is most exciting to you.

       

The Sea of Content

There is so much content on the internet. Just typing APPLES into Google will result in 9 trillion results! It is impossible to look through all that content to find the right information. 

When researching, try to narrow your topic. The more detailed your topic, the more likely you'll find exact information. 

Ask Yourself Questions 

If you are doing a research project on apples, that is too broad of a search term. Start by asking a question: 

Question

 Answer
What do I want to know more with Apples?  I want to know more about how Apples Become Cider!

Apple Cider is more precise than Apples, but it is still a bit too broad. Instead, ask yourself another question

Question

 Answer
What do I want to know about Apple Cider? I want to know how Apple Cider is made!

The making of apple cider is now precise, but we can narrow the topic even more by asking another question: 

Question

 Answer
What do I want to know about Making Apple Cider? I want to know how Fermentation Makes Apple Cider

The Fermentation of Apple Cider is now a very precise topic! 

If you are having trouble coming up with questions for your specific topic you can try to use the 5Ws to narrow down your search.

Keyword Searching

Using Keywords

Using our library database when searching for articles does not work like using a typical search engine.  A library database will look for all the words you put into the search box, exactly how you have typed them.  A typical search engine though will ignore some of the words you have typed into the search box, or look for words that are close to your word or term when performing your search.

So if you typed into a library database:

Why are children more overweight?

 

The library database will literally look for ALL the following words: 

 

Why
Are
Children
More
Overweight

 

Words like WHY, ARE, and MORE are unneeded in your search and could complicate the results.

 

Instead, we should identify the main concepts of our search.  These can be the parts of our search that are most important, or that do not describe another part of our thesis statement. These concepts are called keywords and these are the words that we use to search with.

 

Children
Overweight
Causes

 

Using Synonyms

A synonym is a word that is similar to your keywords.  Not everyone uses the same words to describe the same concept and we want to make sure that we do not miss important sources.

For example, we can use other words for Overweight:

 

Obesity
Fat
Large

 

Putting it all together

By adding an OR to each keyword or using the drop down box to the left, the database will search for sources that contain either term. This allows us to use multiple synonyms in the same search.

 

By adding an AND to each keyword or using the drop down box to the left, the database will search for sources where both items appear. The allows us to narrow our search down using multiple main terms together.

Still having trouble coming up with some keywords to use?  Try using this worksheet from UConn to point you in the right direction.

Newspapers, Magazines, and Academic Journals

Find Books & Ebooks

Watch this short video to find out how to search the QV Campus Library Catalog for physical books.

Find Print Books

QV Research - Search Physical Books

Type either the book title or keywords into the search bar in order to explore QV's physical book collection. 

QV Research - Search Ebooks

This search bar will looking through all of QVCC's Ebook collections, if you wish to look in a particular collection, look below.