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Quinebaug Valley Campus Library

Quinebaug Valley EDUC 2010 Foundations of U.S. Public Education

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.

Keeping Track of your Research

Research we do for an academic assignment is not the same thing as research we do at home.  Think about the last few things you asked a search engine.  Most of the time we look for things like: what other movies is this actor in, what's the phone number for my vet's office, where is the nearest Mexican restaurant, etc.  All of these searches are quick because we have a specific question that can be answered using one web site. 

Now think about what you are asked to find for your academic assignments.  The first big difference is that you are unlikely to be asked to find a specific answer that only uses one web page to answer.  More likely, you will be asked to find multiple sources to formulate your own, individual answer.  This means that academic research just takes longer, and that's fine. You will also be expected to keep track of where you got the information to create your answer. 

If research is going to take us longer than we are used to, we want to make sure that we do not accidentally redo our research when our research occurs in chunks over multiple days or weeks.  We also want to make sure that we do not redo our research when it comes time to acknowledge the sources we used to create our answer.

This Research Tracking Worksheet will help you keep track of all the steps that are a part of academic research as well as giving you a place to save your research as you go.  We recommend that you save another copy of this worksheet whenever you have a research project.