Prof. Casey - Eng. 101; SPRING 2025: Narrow Your Topic and Develop a Search Strategy

Narrowing a topic requires you to create a specific question about something that interests you. This will focus your research and make your information-gathering process more manageable.

Thinking about the following questions will help you narrow your topic.  

Who? is the specific person or group on which you will focus? 

What? do you want your readers to know about your issue, problem or question?

Where?  is the geographic area or region you would like to study?

When? what time period will be your focus?

How? will you persuade your readers to care about your findings?

Why? is it important to study this topic?

Search Strategies:

• Use keywords, synonyms and related concepts that you discovered in your background reading.
• When you search the library databases look at the subject terms listed under the title of the articles. Can you use the subject terms as additional keywords.
• Use truncation 
  • Type an asterisk symbol  *  at end of the root of a word. When you do this, the database will search for alternative endings of the word.

For example, 

        Typing soci* will yield results for 

              social(s)    socialize(d)    socialization    society    societal    sociology