Skip to Main Content
University of Texas University of Texas Libraries

UGS 302: Ethics of AI: Thinking About Good Systems / Jiao

How to choose and develop a topic

Choosing a topic is research - and it is the hardest part!

It is important to choose and refine your topic through research.

in this drawing, an initial idea is refined through searching the literature. It is an iterative process through which your topic is changed by the arguments and conversation you are seeing in the literature.

What should I be looking for when choosing a topic?

  • Identify an existing controversy. You are entering an existing conversation.
  • Identify stakeholders: who is, specifically, impacted? Who is coming up with solutions? What expertise do they have?
  • Identify specialized language and keywords that will inform your searches within the scholarly literature.
  • Want a shortcut for discovering important articles and books that you can use as sources in your paper? Use the works cited/bibliographies at the end of encyclopedia entries.

Using news articles to discover a topic

An easy way to discover a current controversy is to read the news. Searching for news through any library is very challenging because news organizations do not have incentive to provide access to their materials through libraries. Their major revenue streams are advertisements and subscriptions.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.