Information Literacy, Level Two

Research involves an investigation.  Just as detectives ask questions of witnesses and suspects in order to solve a case, you need to formulate a question that can be answered by books and articles in order to better understand your topic. The information you get from these sources becomes the "evidence" that you use to answer your question.

A good research question is not answerable by yes or no, is interesting to you, isn't too narrow or broad, and is feasible to research. Reference sources can be helpful tools that give you background information on a variety of topics when you are trying to formulate a research question.

A single topic can inspire many different questions.  Take teenage obesity.  Here are a few questions you could ask:

1) How have fast-food eating habits contributed to the rise in obesity?

2) How has social media impacted the self-image of overweight teens?

3) Should schools change their school lunch plans or require more PE to combat obesity?

This three-minute video from the ProQuest Research Companion emphasizes the importance of asking good questions:

If your topic is too broad, your searches will return too many results, and the topic won't be specific enough to focus your paper on. 

If your topic is too narrow, you're searches will return too few results, and you won't have enough content for your paper. 

If your topic is too specific you won't find sources that address it, so you should consider these questions:

• Could you add elements to your topic for examination?
• Could you think more broadly about this topic? Give thought to the wider implications of your research.
• Who are the key players in this topic?
• What other issues are involved in this topic?
• Eliminate any very specific keywords from your searches.

If your topic seems too broad, consider these questions:

• What do you already know about the subject?
• Is there a specific time period you want to cover?
• Is there a geographic region or country on which you would like to focus on specifically?
• Is there a particular aspect of this topic that interests you? For example, historical influence, sociological aspects, psychological angles, specific groups or individuals involved in the topic.
  •  Think of: Who, Where, When, and Why?
• Browse search results to find a particular aspect of your topic that you see repeated and rewrite your research question/search terms to focus in on that new aspect.

Now that you have formulated a research question and ensured that your question isn't too broad or narrow, it is time to come up with the keywords that you will use in your searches. Keywords are terms that convey the principle concepts of your topics—the more complicated the topic is, the more keywords you may need.

The easiest way to find keywords is to look at your research question and draw out key concepts.

If your research question is "How have fast-food eating habits contributed to the rise in obesity?" the key concepts you could pull out are fast-food, eating habits, and obesity. These are great keywords to start with, but they might not draw every helpful article so its helpful to also brainstorm synonyms for these words. Then, you might have a list of keywords that looks like this: 

• fast-food, junk food, takeaway food, takeout 
• eating habits, dietary patterns, eating patterns, food choices
• obesity, overweight

You can then use these keywords to build and use advanced searches. 

When you are beginning to research your topic, it is important to keep in mind the types of sources that are required for your assignment. You want to make sure that you are searching in the right places and using helpful searches to find the appropriate types of sources.