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Humanities Honors Thesis

Getting Started

Background Information

Gathering background information can help in identifying important terms and concepts, names of relevant people or places, and dates of specific events, and offer a general overview or further context for your research topic.

Brainstorming Keywords

1. Save time, prepare to research!

  • Break your research question into key concepts (you'll connect these in your paper to make an original argument)
  • For each of these concepts, brainstorm multiple keywords

Sample Topic:

   Services for college students with disabilities 

Key Concepts

services

college students

 disabilities

Related Keywords

accommodations
assistive tech*

university
higher education
campus

disab*
ability
ableism

 

  • Try out this keyword tool to brainstorm online and send the results to yourself.


2. Combine keywords using AND and OR:

  • Too many results? Try using quotation marks around an exact phrase. Ex: "students with disabilities"
  • Still too many results? Narrow using AND. Ex:  "students with disabilities" AND "assistive technology"
  • Too few results? Broaden using OR. Ex: "students with disabilities" AND (campus OR college OR university OR higher education)
  • Put parentheses around synonyms.
  • The asterisk finds multiple endings from a root word. Ex: wom* will bring back women, woman's, wombat, etc.

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