Choosing a Topic for a Research Paper: Refining Your Topic

Once you've found an interesting topic, and you do some preliminary research, you may find that there is too much or too little information to work with.

Too much?

If you find that there is too much to write about, or more than you need for a short paper, you should consider narrowing your topic. In other words, choosing a more specific topic than one you started with.

For example:

• Instead of writing about pollution, maybe write about water pollution or plastic pollution in the ocean.
• You might be able to limit by region or country, such as writing about the cost of college in the United States instead of the cost of college everywhere. This is especially useful for topics for which practices, laws, and conditions may be different in different places.

How you can change your search strategy:

• You can add additional keyword(s) to your search, such as adding "United States" to "college cost". 
• You can change keywords, such as using "wind energy" instead of "alternative energy". In this case, the concept of wind energy implies alternative energy, so you don't need to use the word "alternative" in your search.

Not Enough?

On the other hand, you might have to broaden your topic if you find that you're having a hard time finding enough resources to write your paper.

• You could expand the focus of your topic. For example, instead of focusing on a particular treatment for a particular health condition, you could address different treatments for the condition, and/or different conditions that the treatment can be used for.
• You could expand the geographic scope of your topic. For example, you might be interested in how an environmental issue affects Hawaiʻi, but you could look at how it affects island ecosystems in general.

If your assignment requires you to use (or not use) particular types of information sources, it could affect the topics you can write about.

• Books are a good source for comprehensive, in-depth information. However, they usually take years to write. If a topic you are interested in is a new issue or has had a lot of recent developments, you might have a hard time finding books that cover that topic.
• Periodicals (newspapers, magazines, and journals) are an excellent source for recent information. However, if you are interested in a well-established topic that doesn't change much over time, you might find that people don't write magazine articles about that topic very often.
• Journals are the best source of information about developments in an area of academic study or science. However, they're not a great source for topics that people don't do in-depth research and experimentation in. More about scholarly and peer-reviewed journals.
• Newspapers are often the best source of information about events and issues that affect specific communities. Without newspaper articles, it may be hard to find citable information sources about some aspects of life in Hawaiʻi.

Many of our research databases list subjects in the records for books and articles. This screenshot from the library catalog is for a book called Plastic Soup: An Atlas of Ocean Pollution.

In this case, a librarian has picked these subject terms from a huge list of subjects to describe what the book is about. For articles from a research database, the database producer may have picked the terms, and/or the author of an article may have supplied words that describe its topic.

These subject terms:

• Help you find other books and/or articles tagged with the same terms.
• Give you other ideas for topics you might want to focus your paper on.
• Tell you words that are commonly used to describe a topic. In this case, it tells you that good keywords for researching plastic pollution in the ocean are "marine pollution" and "plastic marine debris".