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Resources to aid research using primary and secondary sources.

Help with Writing Papers

Your librarian can help you with researching your paper, but what about the actual writing process?

Asking Research Questions

What is a topic you care about?

When doing research for courses at Brown, you might be asked to "choose a topic" for an assignment. While being so open-ended can be freeing for some, it can be anxiety provoking for others. When you are starting on a new project ask yourself: What is a topic I care about?

We can take your curiosity and translate it into a research question.

What makes a research question?

Research questions in different fields, like physics, sociology, or theater, might seem like they are radically different from one another, but they share some basic elements.

Research questions are:

  • Answerable

  • "Scaled" or "scoped" to be answerable within your time frame

  • Framed in a context, discipline, and/or rationale

If you are stuck, try framing your initial topic like this: “I’m interested in learning more about __________because ___________.”

Examples

Topic: I'm interested in learning more about industrial pollution because I'm concerned about pollution and climate change.
Research Question: What are the concentrations of heavy metals in the drinking water in riverways surrounding recently closed coal-fired power plants in New England?

Topic: I'm interested in queer history in the Middle East.
Research Question: What is the history of sexual reassignment in Morocco during the French Mandate?

Topic: I'm interested in censorship and democracy, especially examples of censorship in pop culture.
Research Question: What were the music censorship policies in Franco's Spain, and how did the transition to democracy affect the policies and practices of censorship?

In practice

Find a news article you read recently that left you excited to learn more. The subject doesn’t matter; it could be about athletics, the outdoors, gaming, government, cooking, robotics, music, you name it — as long as it's something that piqued your interest!

Pick a research field that you are interested in. Browse Brown Academic Departments if you need ideas.

Write three research questions that someone in that field might ask about this topic.

What more do you need to know?

Practice developing and scoping research questions with one of the following activities:

  1. Ask yourself the who, what, where, when, and why of this issue.
  2. Draw a concept map of the topic, noting areas where you have questions, made assumptions, or want to learn more.
  3. Do more background reading on the topic. Some good places to start are:
    • Wikipedia
    • Newspaper/online magazine articles
    • Review articles (a type of academic article)
    • A reading that your instructor previously assigned

 

See more:

Build Strong Searches

1) Be specific.

Use similar terms, synonyms, or specific terminology. For example, instead of using eating disorders you might use anorexia or bulimia. Or, use specific terms like eating disorders in the 1980s among men. Keep a list of keywords that work.

2) Link your terms in specific ways.

Use AND, OR, NOT to control search rankings and results. A better search phrase might be: anorexia AND eating disorders AND 1980s AND men.

3) Get rid of what you don’t need or want.

Since anorexia is a specific type of eating disorder, we really don’t need to include "eating disorders" as well.

4) Broaden terms to capture variation with * (asterisk).

Example, a search for grad* will search for a variety of terms that build on the stem such as graduate, graduating, graduates, etc. 

5) Narrow terms to focus on your topic.

Put quotation marks around phrases or words that should show up in results together, such as "labor union". In this case, a search will be done for both labor and union -- in that order.

6) Control your search

Use parentheses to group similar terms together if you are not sure what term might be used in a search, such as(college OR university). In this case, a search will be done for results that contain either college or university in the results. 

7) Search for phrases

Search for words that should always appear in a particular sequence, search for the entire phrase by using quotation marks. "Eating disorders" will look for those two words as a phrase instead of looking for eating and disorders as separate words.