Read your assignment carefully. If you have any questions about the instructions or your professor's expectations, ask your professor for clarification.
Is there a required number of sources or source types?
Were you instructed to use any specific books, journals, websites, or databases in your research?
If you have a choice, you should always pick a topic that interests you and one with which you are already somewhat familiar.
For topic ideas
*Part of the Database Offerings in Galileo, Georgia's Virtual Library.
Now that you have a general topic, focus it by asking yourself the following:
Ask yourself the following questions about your project:
As you read through background sources, try to identify the main concepts associated with your topic. Make a list of the terms used to refer to these concepts. You can later search for words from this list in reference books, periodical databases, indexes, and other information sources. Keep in mind that these sources may not use the same terms to identify your topic that you would. When looking at citations in periodical databases you can see the headings, or terms, used to describe a certain article in the "subject heading" or "descriptor" field. Find other articles on the same topic by searching under these headings. The same applies to book catalogs.