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FIGURING out what is your topic is more difficult than it would seem. Often, you have to look at many, many items that you don't want before you can begin to figure out what it is that you do want. This is when browsing can help. Another great help are encyclopedias, which give nice overviews of topics, and can help you think more precisely about what you want. Encyclopedias also provide terminology for words to search on and give you some other ideas. Finally, encyclopedias provide you with more structure than a simple Google search, which often can be quite confusing at a moment when you are really searching for some kind of order and meaning. There may be a place to use Google and Yahoo, and while they can help you at this point, in general, beware of them at this stage.

Albius Tibullus (c. 54-19 BC) From Wikimedia

Very important considerations in developing your topic are:

1. the amount of time you have to complete the assignment (e.g. I have two hours, two days, or two months)
2. the type of assignment (e.g. It is a short oral presentation or a 20 page paper)
3. are the resources available (e.g. I want to do a paper on Japanese papermaking but there is no information available)

(ask a librarian for help before you give up too quickly on this. There may be lots of information but it may be especially difficult to find)

Other points to keep in mind:

1. can you complete the assignment by using the latest newspapers and magazines, or do you need to use earlier materials as well?
2. do you need to use scholarly journals or primary sources? (see also: How to Find Peer-Reviewed Publications and see Primary Sources in Places to Find Information)
3. what formats do you need? (images, maps)
4. are you presenting different points of view?
   

As we can see, it is not such a simple matter to determine your topic. One scholar recently provided an entertaining discussion of the problems he faced when preparing his lecture (one of the Windsor Lectures at the University of Illinois) Library Research and Its Infrastructure in the Twentieth Century by Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago (March 2008). He wrote:

...[the idea that] library researchers have projects with clear designs is a myth. A few library researchers may actually have such clear designs. And the rest of us pretend to have had them after the fact. And we all force dissertation students to pretend to have them before the fact. But it's all a myth. We don't have clear questions ahead of time. The logical sequence of our articles is unrelated to the chronological sequence of our investigations. Our graduate students' pretended questions in their proposals are not the ones their dissertations will end up answering.

He describes the process he went through as "brachiation," or how monkeys swing through the trees! Experienced researches can have their problems as well!

Continue with: Professional Research Guides