CJ Criminal Justice Resources: Getting Started

Once you have selected a topic to focus on, or after you have been given a topic, you will need to focus your topic. For example, perhaps your broad topic is racial profiling. To narrow your topic, you may consider some of the following:

• People
• Place
• Time
• Specific Event
• Point of View or Specific Problem or Question

For my topic, racial profiling, I could narrow my topic by focusing on a specific group of people, a geographic location where racial profiling is common, and a problem or consequence that is a result of racial profiling.

Next, you should consider whether you can turn your topic into a research question. For example, my research question could be:

Does racial profiling against black men in America play a role in increasing poverty within black communities?

Once you have a narrow research question or topic, you will need to come up with keywords to use in the library's databases to find relevant sources.

https://www.columbiacollege.ca/library/library-skills-tutorial/developing-a-research-question

Now that you've got a research question, how do you search for sources to support your research? The key is teasing out terms to use in searching. Let's start with the question:

Does racial profiling against black men in America play a role in increasing poverty within black communities?

First, we isolate the important phrases; in this case, men, black, racial profiling, poverty, and communities. We can use these phrases as starting points for a list of synonymous terms, broader and narrower topics, related words, and reversed word orders. Here's a quick list:

Phrases are searched as keywords unless they are surrounded by quotation marks (" ").

Another helpful tool is truncation. Using an asterisk (*) at the end of a root of a word will search all endings. For example, a search with "communit*" searches the following:

• community
• communities