Finding Sources for Your Reading or Writing Assignment
This interactive tutorial worksheet will help you find quality sources for your assignment. You will learn how to narrow your topic focus, build a search strategy, and then will get experience finding sources.
What is your name?
1. Describe what you're researching. What are you trying to find information about?
Is Your Topic Researchable?
Sometimes the research topic or question you originally come up with needs to be changed a bit to be researchable. Take a look at this list and consider if any of these might be an issue with your topic or research question.
1. Your focus is too general/broad
This is the most common problem students have. They are interested in big issues like climate change, the impact of technology on people's lives, racism, mental illness, or homelessness. But those topics are way too large for a college-level research assignment, so you need to focus on a more specific aspect of it.
2. Your focus is too specific/narrow
Maybe you want to look at the issue of affordable housing in your specific neighborhood in Portland, but there might not be enough information out there to support it. You often don't need to entirely give up your topic, just zoom out your focus a bit.
3. You will not find a diversity of viewpoints on your topic
Good research topics are ones where there isn't just a simple answer. For example, maybe you want to research whether children need love. The answer to that is obviously YES, THEY DO and you're not going to find any source that suggests children don't need love. Also, love is not something you can easily measure. You might be able to tweak your search to perhaps focus on the impact of secure (or insecure) childhood attachment on mental health.
4. There is not enough information about your topic
You might be interested in a very new issue or a topic that people simply aren't studying and writing about yet. If you need to find sources for your project, you can't choose something that no one is writing about.
Let's Test Your Topic!
Test your current topic either in Google News https://news.google.com/ or Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/ (or both). Try searching for your topic in one or both of the search engines. Look at the first page or two of results. Do they look relevant to what you're looking for?

If not, or if very few look relevant, I'll share some strategies on the next page that will help you make your topic more researchable.

Here are some examples:
Screenshot from Google News for "children need love" where results are not relevant
Screenshot from Google News for "children secure attachment mental health" where some results are relevant
Screenshot from Google Scholar for "children secure attachment mental health" where some results are relevant
2. When you searched in Google Scholar or Google News for your topic, did the sources on the first page or two of results look relevant?
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