This lesson is about chosing a research topic for your research paper. In American colleges and many other colleges as well, it is common to have to write a research paper. While there are many differences between different research assignments, there are a few things that they have in common. Most research papers explore complex issues. Because they're complex, they're often very long, maybe ten pages or more. And they also require that you use outside sources to support your ideas. These things are all common with research assignments. However no two research assignments that you get will be the same. Research papers differ by department or field of study. In other words, the Math department's research paper will be very different from the History department's research paper. Also different teachers will have different research assignments. They'll have different rules that they want you to follow. There will be different page links, there will be different requirements for the sources that you use. Some of them will want you to just evaluate information. Some of them will want you to come up with ideas of your own. Some of them will want you to synthesize articles that you read. It all just depends on the teacher and the department that you're studying in. Here is one example of a research assignment and this is for an English class, it's a just a Freshman English class, that means Composition. A lot of times a teacher will give a purpose. They will always give the requirements for the assignment and possibly the deadlines or due dates. You can see that these students will be required to write 10 to 11 pages and they're using MLA format so it'll be double space in 12 point font. And they're being required to use a minimum of five academic sources, and no more than ten sources. Look at the due dates here. Oftentimes for a research paper, there will be several due dates. The teachers like to give you several steps to help you get finished with your research paper. So you will have things to turn in over the course of the assignment. It's always important to pay attention to the dates that you have something due, so that you don't loose points on the assignment. We're still looking at that sample research assignment for the English class. Sometimes teachers will tell you exactly what topic you need to write about. But other times, you'll be able to choose your topic. Maybe from a list that the teacher gives. Here the teacher said to use one of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution to research. Then the students had to find a current controversy that relates to that amendment. So what do we know so far? It has to be related to one of the amendments in the Constitution, and it has to be a current controversy. And then look here, this teacher gives a list of topics that the student cannot choose, and this is a pretty long list. Now you might think that's not very fair that the teacher says you cannot write about all of those topics. Those might be topics that you're really interested in writing about. But remember, your teacher is the one who's going to grade your paper, and your teacher has graded a lot of research papers in the past. So the teacher knows what kind of topics would not make good research papers. Be sure you listen to your teacher's instructions. And notice down here, the teacher tells you there are still many other topics you can choose from, and even gives the students some resources to help them think. We're still looking at that research assignment, research assignments are often several pages long, because the teachers wanna give you all the information about the assignment. Notice here this teacher reminds students about rules of plagiarism. You'll always wanna make sure that you review that, so you don't make any more mistakes. And then also the teacher usually gives you the information you need about grading for the research paper. Notice, this paper is worth 150 points, which would be a portion of the grade for the course. This research paper has lots of different parts, and each of them are worth a few points. Students would want to make sure that they pay attention to this, so that they don't lose any points. If they forget to do one thing that the teacher asks them to do. Let's look at a different topic. Let's say your teacher gave you the topic of media coverage of wars. Maybe this is for a Media Studies class. Or maybe it's for a Sociology class. Regardless, it's a very broad topic, and you probably don't even know what that means right away. The first step would be to come up with a research question. This question would be something that interests you about the topic, here's just an example. Are violent images appropriate for publication, like publication in a newspaper or on TV? So, that question is going to guide our research. This is what we're trying to find the answer to. Let's look at another topic. This one is crime in the U.S. again, this is a very broad topic and you wouldn't know what to write about if your teacher just told you to write on this topic. So we'd come up with a research question. This example says are three strikes laws effective in reducing crime? You may not know what a three strikes law is. This is a law in the American legal system, and it's been debated. And basically it just means that if you are convicted of three serious crimes then you go to jail or prison for life usually. So this is a very complex topic and would make a good research question. And you can see that it's more specific than that general topic that we started with. Once you get your research question, it's time to start your research. To do this you need search terms. The search terms are the words that you're going to use in the search engines to look for articles, and your search terms need to be specific. Remember the topic we started with was crime in the US. If you just searched for crime in the US, you would get too many articles. You would get thousands of articles, in fact. So you want to narrow your topic and use search terms that are more specific. This will give you better results. For this question that we're asking, we might use 3-strikes laws or effects of 3-strikes laws. We could also search 3-strikes reducing crime, or 3-strikes crime reduction. You could think of dozens more search terms related to this topic. And you'll want to use all of these different search terms, when you're looking for articles. If you only used one of these search terms, you might not find the articles you're looking for. The more search terms you use, the more likely you'll find good results.
