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BEHS 210: Introduction to Social Sciences

A Library Subject Guide

Narrow Your Topic

Please be sure to review your class assignment instructions--they give excellent ideas for narrowing your topic.

Below are some other ideas and examples for narrowing your topic and beginning research in a library database. These are only ideas--you don't have to follow these examples exactly in your project!

  • It's important to narrow your topic, because no one can write a paper on a topic as huge and broad as health care, for example, or gender. Narrowing and focusing your topic will help you research and write your project!
  • The searches below use library search techniques: AND, OR, parentheses, quotation marks, and the * symbol. For a refresher on these techniques, please see our library guide for database searching.
  • Please note: The searches below are links that will take you into our library OneSearch database, where you'll see the results of the search. You can then begin reviewing the articles that come up and perhaps even choose a few that you can use in your assignment, if the search closely matches your topic.
Search results in the library are different than in Google. Google gives you a lot of easy-to-understand, practical information. The library will give you primarily in-depth, technically-written, scientific studies. These are called scholarly articles. They can be difficult to understand at first, but if you can choose a scholarly article that relates to your topic and then review the article carefully, you can usually extract a main idea or a relevant fact or two that you can incorporate in your paper.

 

Narrow the topic of Race Issues

Narrow the topic of Homelessness

Narrow the topic of Social Class

Narrow the topic of Health Care

Narrow the topic of Gender

Narrow the topic of the Environment

Narrow the topic of Immigration

Narrow the topic of Sexual Orientation

Narrow the topic of Technology