Picking a research topic, developing a research question, or checking a hypothesis are all part of the process of searching and exploring the existing conversations around your idea. The research process often helps us evolve a topic and question based on resources and evidence you find or the state of the scientific conversation that your question is trying to join. Your research starting point may not be the same as your destination!
You don't have to go into your research knowing exactly what your topic is, but all searches start out with generating keywords that help define your topic and use these as your search terms.
Since database search functions don't use "natural language" (like asking, "what is the relationship between immune system health and vitamin C consumption") and instead asks that we identify search terms or keywords that will help scan all possible results for relevant information (like "immune system" AND "vitamin C" AND "effects"), there are strategies that can help us do academic research that are different from how we search for other kinds of information. Generating keywords can be a process that involves seeing which terms other researchers are using when they ask similar questions and narrowing down specialized vocabularies that different fields and disciplines might use.
In addition to adding in search filters, like specifying a publication date range, type of article or source, or for free/full-text only results, generating keywords is the best way to search strategically and can also help you in the process of articulating your research question and narrowing down or refining some of your own ideas.
This video from our colleagues at Seattle Central College offers a good example of what this process can look like. Their advice to keep "one idea per search bar" is especially helpful:
Tips for developing keywords:
Tip 1: Highlight the main concepts within your research topic.
Example: How do cigarettes affect one's health? The words I would remove are "how", "do", and "one's". That would leave me with "cigarette," "affect," and "health." For this situation, I would change "affect" to "effects" so that the search will include the health effects of cigarettes.
Tip 2: Make a list of synonyms of those highlighted concepts.
Example: cigarette--nicotine, tobacco products, smoking; health--lungs, heart, body; effects--impacts
Tip 3: Write down questions within your research topic and highlight the concepts within those questions.**
Example: How do cigarettes affect one's health? -- What are cigarettes made of? What chemicals are found in cigarettes? What are the short-term and long-term effects of smoking? What kind of tobacco products are there?
As your searches turn up additional results, notice the scholarly conversation happening around your topic. Is the research going in one direction or emphasizing a narrowed-down version of your topic? Do I notice bias or gaps in the search results I'm finding? Ways to tune in to the scholarly conversation include:
One way of developing a research question is to organize your search as a PICO question, by identifying the:
Population
Intervention
Comparison
Outcome
involved in your inquiry. Using a structured question organization like PICO can help you generate search terms and we can try and translate that language back into our search interfaces to see when and how we may need to refine search terms.
From the Librarians at Duquesne University, consider this video on translating PICO questions into concrete searches:
