Find background information on your topic so that you'll begin to understand the who, what, when, where, why, and vocabulary surrounding your topic. This will help you narrow your topic to something manageable and will give you a bit of context so that you can decide more easily where to search later. Begin in Gale Virtual Reference Library, a collection of (mostly) encyclopedia articles, which are short overviews of a topic.
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Start by brainstorming some potential topics to explore further.
Now that you have a potential topic in mind, find out a little more about it to make sure it will work for you.
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Check library databases, such as our main library search bar or Academic Search Complete, to see if journalists or scholars have written about your topic in the popular press or academic journals.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Finally, you'll need to find the right scope for your topic. If it is too broad or too narrow, you may have difficulty covering it adequately in the length assigned for your research project.
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