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.
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
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?
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:
This page will help you:
Jump to:
1) Be specific.
Use similar terms, synonyms, or specific terminology. For example, instead of using search terms like figurative language you might use simile or metaphor, which are both examples of figurative language Or, use a specific term like biblical allegory.
Keep a list of keywords that work!
2) Search for phrases
Search for words that should always appear in a particular sequence-- that is, find an entire phrase-- by using quotation marks. "figurative language" will look for those two words as a phrase instead of looking for figurative and language as separate words.
3) Link and group your terms in specific ways.
Use AND, OR, NOT to yield relevant results.
AND allows you to combine terms to get more specific results. For example, metaphor AND whale AND moby dick will give you more relevant results than "figurative language" AND moby dick.
OR helps when you aren't sure which term might be used in a search. The search "figurative language" OR "figure of speech" will yield results containing at least one of those terms.
NOT excludes words from your results list. For example, metaphor NOT allegory will give you results that include metaphor but not allegory.
Use parentheses to group similar terms together when you use the above combinations.
A sample search combining AND, OR, and parentheses might look like this:
(metaphor OR allegory) AND whale AND "moby dick"
Results from this search will include both the terms metaphor and allegory in combination with whale and "moby dick".
4) Get rid of what you don’t need or want.
Since metaphor is a specific type of figurative language, you don’t need to include both terms in your search.
5) Broaden terms to capture variation with * (asterisk).
Use an asterisk to search for a term that may have many variations, such as trag*. In this case, all terms that start with trag- will be found, including tragedy, tragic, tragedian, tragicomic, etc.
A search might look like this: trag* AND Ahab. [Ahab is a character in Moby Dick.]
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