Getting Started/Background Information - UGS 302 - Live, Play, Communicate, and Learn with Digital Technology - Liu - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Choosing Your Research Topic

Start by brainstorming some potential topics to explore further.

Look through your syllabus or textbook for themes, concepts, or ideas that interest you, even if you haven't covered them in class yet.
Search the topic or name of your course in Google or a library article database. Check out any results that look interesting.
Think about your major or your hobbies. Do any of your personal interests overlap with the topic of the class?

Now that you have a potential topic in mind, find out a little more about it to make sure it will work for you.

Search for background information to get a general overview of the topic.
Sometimes what you find is not what you expected. Make sure the topic still sounds interesting, since you'll be spending a lot of time reading and writing about it.

Gale eBooks
Most current edition. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. A database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources. Fully searchable across all files.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

Check library article databases, such as Academic Search Complete, to see if journalists or scholars have written about your topic in the popular press or academic journals.

Academic Search Complete
1865 - present. Unlimited users.

Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
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.

Too broad - if you found too many results when testing the topic, you might need to choose a specific aspect to focus on. Try looking back in your background information for particular details that interest you.
Too narrow - if you had trouble finding any relevant information in a library database, think more broadly about the topic and what interests you. What are the larger concepts or ideas that your topic falls under?

Background Information

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.

Gale eBooks
Most current edition. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. A database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources. Fully searchable across all files.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
CQ Researcher
1991 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. Explores a single "hot" issue in the news in depth each week. Topics range from social and teen issues to environment, health, education and science and technology. Every report is written by an experienced journalist and features comments from experts, lawmakers and citizens on all sides of every issue with numerous charts, graphs and sidebar articles.

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