Start With a Research Plan

Key Points

One of the first things to do when beginning any information-based project is to identify your need for information. This may seem obvious, but it is something many students take for granted. You may think you already know enough to proceed, but this assumption can lead to wasting valuable time.  To begin research, however, you have to know what it is you are trying to learn, which starts with a research question.  

Why Is This Important to You?

One of the most important things you can do early in a research project is to scan the information landscape. Any topic you need information about is constantly evolving because new information is constantly being added to what is known about the topic. Therefore, you want to develop habits of mind and practice that enable you to continually seek new information, using research questions to focus and narrow your search.

How Do You Develop a Research Question?

Taking your lack of knowledge and turning it into a search topic or research question starts with knowing what you don't know. Reading about a topic before developing your research question can provide you with some terms and keywords that will help you to develop your own research question and search for additional information. 

Developing a research question can be more difficult than it seems. Your initial questions may be too broad or too narrow. You may not be familiar with specialized terminology used in the field; in fact, you may not know if your question is worth investigating at all. Gaining a general understanding of the information environment helps you to pinpoint your information need in context and make you aware of possible alternative directions for your research.

As a graduate student, you will be challenged to find information for different kinds of assignments, from in-depth research reports, to literature reviews of published information on a topic, to essays that may require you to take a position on a controversial issue. If you are starting with a broad topic (war, for example), and want to learn about women's role during a war, you might pose a question such as: "How did the role of American women in the workforce change during World War II?" You have narrowed the topic with your research question and can arrive at a preliminary topic statement. 

The following example shows the process that you might use to go from a broad topic to a preliminary topic sentence, which is also called a thesis.  Your research question leads to a reasonable thesis statement.  

Narrowing a Broad Topic Into a Topic (or Thesis) Statement

Flowchart showing an example of narrowing a research topic: (1) Broad Topic: Pollution, becomes (2) Narrowed Topic: Stormwater runoff, becomes (3) Further Narrowed Topic: Stormwater runoff in the Chesapeake Bay

Once you have identified what you want to learn, investigated the existing information on the topic, and set limits on your research (this may narrow the scope, time frame, or other specific factors you need to learn about), you will be able to pose a research question and come up with a preliminary thesis (or topic statement). For a primer on the research process, check out the Research Tutorial at the UMGC Library.

References

Bernnard, D., Bobish, G., Hecker, J., Holden, I., Hosier, A., Jacobson, T., Loney, T., & Bullis, D. (n.d.) The information literacy user’s handbook. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/chapter/gather-finding-what-you-need/?cv=1