Advice on Selecting a Research Paper Topic

Advice on Selecting a Research Paper Topic

Usually you will have a general idea about your topic for your research paper, but often the hard part is refining the topic so that it is manageable. Here is where Google Scholar can help.

Consider for a moment you have been assigned to research the connection between rainforests and global climate. For fun, you might begin with the one key word just to get a broad overview of what’s out there. A search for rainforest will give you over 100,000 sources, including the book, The Tropical Rain Forest: An Ecological Study by P. W. Richards, which pops up near the top of the list, so you are off to a good start. But you will also find near the top of the list the article “Gap Partitioning among Tropical Rainforest Trees,” which completely misses the mark. You may be interested in the seed distribution and so forth, but not for this particular project.

At this point, you will probably want to further refine your search by adding the other key phrase, global climate. When you do, you will still get over 7,000 hits and will find the 1993 article, “Rainforest burning and the global carbon budget: Biomass, combustion efficiency, and charcoal formation in the Brazilian Amazon.” From the abstract, you can tell that this looks promising, but don’t overlook the fact that this was published in 1993.

This is not to say that you can’t still use the article, but you probably want to keep looking for sources that are more timely and perhaps more relevant. For example from your search results, you will find the article, “The impact of global climate change on tropical forest biodiversity in Amazonia.” This one was published in 2004, so it is more timely.

You may want to continue refining your search. An effective way to do this is to skim  through the search results. In our example of rainforest and global climate, you will see repeated references to Amazon. By adding this word to your search string, you further limit your topic and cut the number of sources in half.  Just be careful that you don’t get carried way and limit too much. Strive for a balance as you refine your topic.

And remember, even though you seem to be getting good results from you key word searches, not all sources are equal.  Some considerations include the timeliness and overall relevancy of the source. This is fairly easy to determine by taking quick look at the publication date and the abstract.

If you keep these points in mind and use an effective search strategy, Google Scholar can help you find the right sources with minimal effort.