LibAnswers

Following these three steps will help you get started on a research assignment:

STEP 1: Do some background research

Background information helps you to learn a little about your topic and narrow it down into a specific focus. For example, a topic like "climate change" is a good place to start. Yet this topic is too broad for most research assignments. How do we take this general topic and make it more specific? 

Some good sources to help you learn about and narrow your topic include: 

• Chapter sections from course textbooks
• Newspaper articles
• Short webpages found by searching Google
• Short videos by educational or government organizations
• Wikipedia and encyclopedia entries
• Topic summaries from ChatGPT or another generative AI tool
• Abstracts (i.e., brief summaries) from academic articles.

STEP 2: Choose the appropriate search tool

There are a variety of tools you can use to discover appropriate supporting material for your assignments:

Read your assignment instructions carefully to see if it requires academic sources. This means you should choose a tool like Google Scholar, the library catalogue, or the library databases that will find formats like journal articles and ebooks

STEP 3: Identify the concepts you need to search for, then choose words that describe them

For some tools, like Google, it is effective to type in your research question. For example, Do forest fires contribute to global warming?

In other tools, like the library catalogue and databases, it is more effective to search for words and phrases only. These are called keywords. For example, "forest fires" AND "global warming."

Authors use different words to describe concepts in a topic. For example, instead of "global warming" an author may use "climate change." For this reason, it helps to search with multiple keywords by considering synonyms and related terms:

Tips for searching:

• Skim search results to find more ideas for keywords
• Place quotation marks around phrases (two or more words that have a single meaning), e.g. "trauma-informed practice", "child development", "weather patterns"
• Use filters to narrow search results by date, format, subject, location, and more

More information about how to do research for college assignments can be found in the Research library guide.