Choosing and developing a viable research topic

• Suggestions for finding a topic
• Identifying a topic
• Testing the topic

Suggestions for finding a topic

• Discuss your topic ideas with your course instructor.
• Discuss your topic ideas with a reference librarian. You can stop by a reference desk, call, or use e-mail to contact the CUL Reference departments. The Reference Desks: Directory lists phone numbers and e-mail addresses for each library's reference desk. It may be wise to set up a research consultation, if your project is lengthy. The Cornell University Library offers a variety of consulting services. Please contact the individual libraries to find out about their consultation services.
• Look over the index and the article titles in a specialized encyclopedia that covers the subject area or discipline of your topic. There are subject encyclopedias, dictionaries, and handbooks for most topics or subject areas. For more details on finding and using encyclopedias and other background sources, go to Finding background information.

Identifying a topic

State your topic idea as a question. For example, if you are interested in finding out about Title IX (Title Nine) and women athletes in college athletic programs, you might pose the question, "How did Title IX impact women athletes in college athletic programs?"

Identify the main concepts or keywords in your question. In this case they are "title ix," "women," "athletes," and "college athletic programs."

Testing the topic

Test the main concepts or keywords in your topic by looking them up in the appropriate background sources. Go to Finding background information to identify and locate these types of sources. Or test your keywords by using them as search terms in the Cornell University Library Catalog. For more information about keyword searching in the CU Library Catalog go to Guided Keyword Searches. These concepts can also be tested in various periodical indexes if you are looking for articles from journals, magazines, or newspapers. Go to Finding periodical articles for more information on selecting indexes and finding articles.

If you are finding too much information and too many sources, narrow your topic by using the and operator. For example: women and athletes and college and athletics.

Finding too little information may indicate that you need to broaden your topic by using a more general term or terms in your search. For example, look for information on "athletes", rather than "women athletes."

Link synonymous search terms with the or operator: athletics or sports. Using truncation with search terms also broadens the search and increases the number of items you find. Truncation is a symbol put at the end or in the middle of a word in order to catch all variant endings or spellings of that word when searching a database. For example, a question mark can be used to truncate keyword search terms in the CUL catalog.   For example, the search athlet? retrieves athlete, athletes, athletic, athletics, etc.