COMM 3301 Reporting Research Guide

1.  Write out a brief description (1 or 2 sentences) of your research topic.  It can be helpful to phrase it in the form of a question that you'd like to answer.

2.  Identify the most important 2 - 4 words from your research question.  These are your key concepts.

Tip:

• To decide which words are most important, imagine that you need to tell someone your topic using no more than 4 words.  Words like "does," "the," "in," or "of" (while useful in a sentence) won't be specific enough, so you wouldn't use those.

3.  For each key concept, make a list of other words with the same or related meanings.  These will be your keywords!

Tips to find keywords:

• Use a thesaurus to find synonyms.
• Think of specific examples or types. 
• If your topic is something you don't know enough about yet, it can be hard to think of synonyms or examples.  Find some background information to jump-start your brainstorming!

To narrow your search, you'll need to "zoom in" on your topic.   Just as placing an object under a microscope reveals detail that's not visible to the naked eye...narrowing your topic will help you identify more specific concepts and keywords.  Your search results will be more focused.

• Just as you did when you chose your keywords, identify each of the major concepts in your topic. 
• For each concept, make a list of specific examples or types. 
  • It may help to first consult a thesaurus, or do a test search to find synonyms (other ways to describe your concepts) and examples.
  • If you can't find a more specific example of one of your concepts...don't worry.  Just get as narrow as you can.
• Search for those more specific concepts, zooming in even further if needed!
   

Let's try an example. 

Suppose our topic is:  How does class interaction help online students succeed?  

We tried searching for interaction AND online students AND success, but most of the articles we found only mentioned interaction briefly, and some weren't really relevant at all.  We need more detail to write a paper about this topic. So, we'll add more detail to our search! 

First, we identify the major concepts and zoom in on each one to find the specifics.  Like this:
 

Now, we'll try searching again...this time mixing and matching our narrower (and even narrower) terms with our original terms, until we get the kinds of results we need: 

• engagement AND online students AND performance
• social networking AND online students AND success
• Facebook AND interaction AND online AND undergraduate students AND learning