Find a Topic - MNS 367K - Human Exploration/Exploitation of the Sea - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Choosing Your Research Topic

Look for Ideas
Search in Biodiversity Heritage Library

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?

"The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth."

To learn more about its long history of archival literature, biodiversity, projects and thousands of volumes, go HERE.

In fact, if you do a keyword search for "fram expedition" or "challenger expedition," you'll be amazed!

Choosing Your Research Topic

Explore

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.

Choosing Your Research Topic

Test the Topic

Check library article databases, such as Academic Search Complete or Web of Science, to see if authors or scholars have written about your topic.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
1990 - 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.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
1900 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. The Web of Science Core Collection is a group of databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1900-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present) that together cover more than 21,000 journals across all disciplines. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present) tracks thousands of additional journals that are being considered for inclusion in the main citation indexes. Other files track references from conference proceedings (1990-present) and citations to books (2005-present).
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.

Choosing Your Research Topic

Scope the Topic

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?