Narrowing the Topic

Suppose you want to write your research paper on World War II. The material written on World War II has filled whole libraries, so you obviously won’t be able to complete a research paper on all of WWII in just a few weeks or months.

First-level Narrowing

The first question to ask yourself is: “What aspect of WWII am I interested in understanding better?”

• Strategies?
• Weapons?
• Major characters?
• Specific battles?

Let’s say you want to understand more about WWII weapons. Which types of weapons were used in WWII?

Second-level Narrowing

You consult a couple of encyclopedia articles on WWII weapons and discover that the general categories of weapons at that time were tanks, artillery, and firearms.

Each of these categories includes several dozen to several hundred specific weapons.

Can you cover all of these in one paper? Sure, if you write a sentence on each one. But then you’re not really writing a research paper; you’re writing a list. You need to go deep with your analysis, not wide. In other words, you want to fully explore your topic and not treat it in a very superficial manner.

Third-level Narrowing

You continue to survey general information sources on WWII weapons. You read a little bit about each of the categories listed in the Second-Level Narrowing tab and decide that the one you are most interested in is artillery. Now what kind?

• Surface-to-air missiles (SAMS)?
• Machine guns?
• Anti-aircraft guns (Flaks)?

As you continue to poke around, you learn that air defense tactics and the various models of anti-aircraft guns were extremely critical in various battles, so you decide to focus on that.

Fourth-level Narrowing

Look at your previous terminology: “critical in various battles.” Do you think you’ll be able to do a paper on the role of anti-aircraft guns in all battles of WWII? No, you won’t. So the next logical step is to look at encyclopedias and websites to determine what were some of the major battles of WWII where the use of anti-aircraft guns was critical.

You remember hearing something about “the Blitz” of London, so you look that up and decide to focus on the role of anti-aircraft guns in defending London from German aerial attacks.

Preliminary Search Tips

Even when you are early in the stages of your paper, just deciding on a topic, you’ll need to use outside sources to help you decide how to narrow your focus. At this stage, you should bookmark and save websites or sources you think will be useful later on, but the focus at this point will be gathering general information to see what jumps out to you as interesting or helpful. Below are some preliminary search tips:

1. Start with Wikipedia as a reference, but do not use it as an official source. Look at the links and references at the bottom of the page for more ideas.
2. Use “Ctrl+F” to find certain words within a webpage in order to jump to the sections of the article that interest you.
3. Use Google Advanced Search to be more specific in your search. You can also use tricks to be more specific within the main Google Search Engine:
   1. Use quotation marks to narrow your search from just tanks in WWII to “Tanks in WWII” or “Tanks” in “WWII”.
   2. Find specific types of websites by adding “site:.gov” or “site:.edu” or “site:.org”. You can also search for specific file types like “filetype:.pdf”.
4. Click on “Search Tools” under the search bar in Google and select “Any time” to see a list of options for time periods to help limit your search. You can find information just in the past month or year, or even for a custom range.

This first stage of gathering information is sometimes called pre-research. Watch this video to learn more:

You can view the transcript for “Doing Some Background Checks on Your Research” here (download).