Topic/Research Question

● Choose a specific topic or question from a broad domain.

○ Domain: area of knowledge or skill.
○ Narrow it down from the domain of interest.
● Choose something that you’re interested in.
● Don’t stop brainstorming and don’t limit your ideas
● Turn the specific topic into a question.
○ Example:
■ Topic: Global Warming --> Specific Topic: Wildfires –> Question: How
have wildfires in the American West, caused by rising temperatures,
affected populations?

What kind of research do you need?

● Primary Research: Research coming from primary sources.

○ First-Hand witnesses, real-life human accounts.
● Secondary Research: Research coming from secondary sources.
○ News articles, books, information coming from second-hand experiences from
authors, journalists, etc.
● Tertiary Research/Encyclopedia: Research coming from encyclopedias like wikipedia.
○ Information coming from sources a large number of people contribute to.

Steps that you can take:

● If struggling for topics, visit tertiary sources like wikipedia to find information about a
broad domain of interest.
● Look for the abstract of a topic in CLIO first to see if it’s interesting.
● Use bibliographies in encyclopedias to guide you to more sources.
● Filter databases for specific source types (i.e. primary source or secondary source).
● Some databases only give specific source-types.
○ If you’re looking for scholary articles, google scholar is good because it only uses
scholarly articles.
●
Research resources:

● greenFile: https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/basic?vid=0&sid=8dc2552a-e676-
42c3-a93b-fff2de65ecd4%40redis
● Jstor: https://www.jstor.org/
● Columbia: https://clio.columbia.edu/
●

Example:

Research Question: What is the rate of climate migration due to climate change?