Information Literacy
In This Chapter
Learning Objectives
- Learn strategies for identifying a research topic
- Locate sources that provide an overview of your topic
Summary
A research topic isn’t something you have to pull out of thin air. Rather you should read about your topic, see what ideas are most interesting to you, and respond to them. Reading overview sources is a good way to get the big picture and decrease the likelihood that you will overlook a major part of the conversation.
“Coming Up” with a Topic
There really isn’t a part of research called “coming up with a topic.” It isn’t an activity that you can separate from “reading about a topic” or “writing some thoughts down about a topic.” You may already know quite a lot about your topic, but brainstorming as though the perfect topic and question are already in your head waiting to come out can be stressful and, as we saw in the last chapter, this can be a recipe for motivated reasoning and reinforcing our existing beliefs. We need to get a sense of the variety of issues and perspectives relevant to a wicked problem before we can make a good decision about what to focus on.
So if you are the kind of person who struggles to pull a topic out of thin air, you can stop worrying about that now. In this chapter we propose a different strategy: read some introductory material on your topic, write down what captures your attention, and then connect it to what you care about. Even if you don’t struggle with brainstorming topics, try this approach and see how it compares.
Reading
Again, coming up with a topic cannot be separated from reading. How will you know what interests you most about a wicked problem if you haven’t been exposed to all the different facets of it? Why just choose the first thing that comes to mind when you could explore the topic and find a direction that connects meaningfully to your own life, one that you maybe didn’t know existed?
Start by reading the material that your instructor provides. (Sometimes your instructor won’t provide any, or it won’t spark any ideas for you. That’s ok. Below we’ll cover how to find your own introduction to a topic.)
There are many different kinds of reading, and they are all ok. You may do a lot of skimming when first learning about a topic. You may skim most of an article or chapter and then find one section that really grabs you, then slow down and read that more carefully. You may skim a source once and decide to try something else, or you may decide it’s worth a second closer reading. (You might be surprised at what it’s possible to miss when you only read something once.)
Sometimes you will find yourself reading something that does not spark any interesting questions, where you don’t find any interesting ideas to collect. That’s ok, just move on to the next reading.
Remember, scholarship is a conversation. Most ideas don’t spring forth, from thin air. While we usually talk about reading texts, there’s no reason you can’t get ideas from