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Choose a topic
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Choose and Develop a Topic 

  • Think about your topic in terms of a question.
  • Pick out the important terms or keywords from it.
  • Come up with other related terms or synonyms

 

For example:

 

Questions

Keywords

Synonyms / Related Terms

How does binge drinking effect college students?

What effect does violence in the media have on children?

How do state laws differ on the death penalty?

binge drinking, college students

violence, media, children

state laws, death penalty

alcohol, young adults

TV, movies, youth

execution, capital punishment

 Use your keywords and related terms to develop your search for sources on your topic.

 

Using Boolean logic to refine a search in online databases:

For example:

alcohol and college (tells the computer to search for sources which contain the words 'alcohol' and 'college')

Using truncation to find all forms of a word

For example:

violen? and school? (tells the computer to search for the words 'violence' and 'violent' and 'school' and 'schools')

Be sure to check the HELP in the database you are searching to be sure that truncation is allowed and what the symbol for it is. (Some databases use an * rather than the ?)

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