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COMM 105 - Speaking of Ideas: Home

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This guide provides recommended research tools and skills for COMM 105.

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Related Research Guides

Thinking About Your Topic and Formulating a Plan

Brainstorming Topics and Choosing One

Choosing a topic is the first step in starting your research. It is a good idea to start with a broad topic and narrow it down based on your interest, perspective, and available resources. Questions to help you choose a topic:

  • Are you interested in learning more about this topic?
  • Does this topic meet your assignment requirements?
  • Are there many perspectives to explore within this topic?

Choose a broad topic and begin to narrow it down. Consider the "angle" you approach your topic from. You may consider using a brainstorm/mind mapping worksheet or free online tool (such as mindmeister) to help you narrow the topic and start your research.

Starting with Keywords

Before you begin researching a topic you will need to do some "presearch." This means thinking critically about the topic and brainstorming keywords, terms, and concepts associated with your topic. Creating a mind map can help you in this process when you complete it on your own, but for now we will work together on one topic from our brainstorming session.

Example from Class: Students generated the keywords below for the topic "Pixar"

Tips for brainstorming keywords on your topic:

  • Who, what, when, where, why and how?
  • Write a couple sentences or a question you'd like to answer about your topic and start with words pulled from that sentence:
    • Example question: Are women paid less than men in historically male-dominated fields?
    • Keywords: women, income, male-dominated, fields
  • Generate a list of related concepts and synonyms to go with your initial keywords:
    • Related: wage gap, emotional labor, profession, workforce, gender, STEM

Using Keywords to Build a Search Query

Once you have a good list of keywords its time to try them out. These strategies will help you regardless of the tool you choose for your research query.

  • Use Boolean operators to form your search: AND, OR, NOT are most common.
  • Use quotations around phrases you want to get an exact match for: "wage gap"
  • Use truncation and wildcards where appropriate (*, ?, !)
  • Keep search terms short.
    • Weak query: wage gap between men and women in male-dominated fields
    • Better query: "wage gap" AND "male-dominated" AND "wom?n"

Where will you find the best sources for your topic?

When you're ready to research a topic (you've listed your keywords) and gather basic information it's a good idea to try a few general sources such as the ones below. You may also browse the A-Z database list for other databases or start your search on the web. These questions can help you think critically about the results garnered from your searches:

  • Can you identify at least 2-3 different perspectives on your topic?
  • How about contradicting perspectives?
  • Is there a particular pattern among the results that may show bias or underrepresentation within a topic's published materials?

 

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