LibGuides: Construction Management Guide: Choose a Topic

Choose and Develop Your Topic

Choosing a Good Topic Resources
This document has links to help you find a topic, research your topic, and focus your topic

Choosing a Topic
This tutorial will explain how to select a topic and narrow it down if needed.

Before you develop your research topic or question, you'll need to do some background research first.

Some good places to find background information:

Your textbook or class readings
Encyclopedias and reference books
Credible websites
The Library databases on the OneSearch page

When you're ready, move on to refining your topic.

Refining Your Topic
Learn strategies for selecting and refining your topic by narrowing or broadening it, and how to control the number of results by adding or removing search terms.

Now that you've done some background research, it's time to narrow your topic. Remember: the shorter your final paper, the narrower your topic needs to be. Here are some suggestions for narrowing and defining your topic:

Is there a specific subset of the topic you can focus on?
Is there a cause and effect relationship you can explore?
Is there an unanswered question on the subject?
Can you focus on a specific time period or group of people?

Describe and develop your topic in some detail. Try filling in the blanks in the following sentence, as much as you can:

I want to research ____(what/who)____

and ____(what/who)____

in ____(where)____

during ____(when)____

because ____(why)____.