When it comes to academic research, the goal is not to make you into a librarian. The goal is to help you develop the skills needed to complete your assignments. Specifically, the ability to search effectively, evaluate information critically, and use scholarly resources to support your work in an ethical manner.
To develop a research topic or question, you'll need to do some background reading first.
These are good places to find topic ideas and gather some general information on them:
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Once you have an idea you'd like to pursue, move on to refining your topic.
Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education
Now that you've done some background research, it's time to narrow your topic.
Here are some suggestions for narrowing and defining your topic:
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Use this framework to help you describe and develop your topic in some detail:
(p.49) Booth, W. C., Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., Williams, J. M., & FitzGerald, W. T. (2016). The craft of research (Fourth edition.). University of Chicago Press.
Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education
Identify the most important ideas or aspects of your topic. You will use those as your keywords to start searching for information about your topic. | ![]() |
What other words might be used to describe those main ideas or concepts?
Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education
More Databases to Explore -
Click on the information icon to see what kind of articles are included in each database.
Find Books - At the college level, use books written for an academic audience instead of those written for popular reading. | ![]() |
Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education
Find Data and Statistics - Providing facts and figures from scholarly research lends support to your argument or position. | ![]() |
Credibility - Data provide meaningful and replicable information about a topic, condition, or population.
Visual - Sometimes a picture or a chart or a graph really is worth a thousand words.
Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education