Picking Your Topic IS part of the Research Process: Refining Your Topic

Tweaking Your Topic

Once you start exploring the various search results that you receive, you may need to either ‘Narrow your topic’s scope’ OR ‘Broaden your topic. The question is how do you know when you need to narrow your topic’s scope vs broadening the topic? Here are some helpful points to help determine this.

When to Narrow Your Topic’s Scope

• Does your search result contain too much information?  A way of resolving this issue is to make your results list more manageable. Look at some of the suggested subject matters your search result yield, to aid in filtering your results. Remember, less, but more relevant, information is key.
• Take in consideration the subject and required length of the assignment. Be careful not to choose a topic that is too broad in scope. Instead, focus on a particular event, time, person or group, and/or place.

Example:

"Social Media "

Social Media comes in various mediums and has a vast effect in business, commercial, entertainment, education, and personal life, to name a few. This topic would be too general and broad to research and cover in a short paper of 5-10 pages. Instead, it would be necessary to narrow the focus of the topic to some smaller aspect of social media.

"Social Media and Bullying in U.S. K-12 Schools"

The original topic has been narrowed and is now more manageable because it focuses on a particular type aspect of social media (bullying), time (current rather than historic), person or group (grades K-12), and place (focus on U.S.).

When to Broaden Your Topic

Not finding enough information?  Think of related ideas, or read some background information first.  You may not be finding enough information for several reasons, including:

• Your topic is too specific.  Generalize what you are looking for.
• Your topic is too new for anything substantive to have been written.  If you're researching a recently breaking news event, you are likely to only find information about it in the news media. Be sure to search databases that contain articles from newspapers. If you are not finding enough in the news media, consider changing your topic to one that has been covered more extensively.
• You have not checked enough databases for information. 
• You are using a less common term for the topic or too much jargon to describe your topic.  Use a thesaurus to find other terms to represent your topic. Read background information, and note how your topic is expressed in these materials. When you find citations in an article database, see how the topic is expressed by experts in the field and look at the subjects that have been identified.

Example:

"How Bullying on Social Media Contributed to Jamey Rodemeyer’s Death "

The death of this adolescent is tragic, but you are unlikely to find an abundance of scholarly information based on this specific person’s death. This is an example where you will need to broaden the focus on the underline subject matter in order to write an effective paper.

"How Social Media and Cyber bullying contributes to Suicides"

By altering the focus of the subject matter from one person or issue to some larger aspect of the person or issue (cyber bullying and suicides), we have expanded the scope of the topic so that more relevant and scholarly information can be found.