Getting Started with Research

This guide is intended for anyone getting started with a research paper or project. It covers the early stages of the research process, from choosing and narrowing your topic to developing your research plan. Even if you’ve done research before, this page is a great place to find tips and tricks to doing research more efficiently.

Steps of the Research Process:

  1. Choose your topic
  2. Find Background Information
  3. Develop Your Research Plan
  4. Understanding Source Types
  5. Evaluate Your Sources
  6. Write & Cite

Keep in mind that you likely won’t proceed through these steps linearly. Research can be messy! You may find yourself finding background information, refining your research question, possibly changing your topic, and then finding more background information. Navigate through the steps on this page in the way that works for you.

Lastly, Libraries staff are available to help if you get stuck! Reach out through Ask a Librarian for research support whenever you need it.

1. Choose your topic

First, let’s choose a topic and then build our research question.

Topic: Your research topic will be a broad area of exploration from which you’ll develop a research question. Try to think of a topic that you can analyze rather than just describing or reporting on it. For example, let’s use the following topics to expand into research questions: urban green space, student activism, true crime

Research Question: Your research question will be more focused and specific than your topic. Remember that this isn’t your thesis statement, but rather a question to guide your research process as you search for perspectives and conversations to inform your question. For example:

  • How does urban green space contribute to the mental health of local residents?
  • How is social media used to organize student activism?
  • What factors have contributed to the popularity of true crime podcasts with white women?

What makes a good research question?

Your research question will be about a focused sliver of information within your topic. Qualities of a good research question include:

Open and explorable

Ask a question that doesn’t have a yes or no answer, and can’t be answered with a fact. Your topic should be answerable in the scope of your paper, but not have an obvious answer.

  • Closed question: How many urban green spaces are there in Boston?
  • Open question: How does urban green space impact the mental and physical health of local residents?

Specific and focused

Your question should tell you what your research is about. You should feel like you know what information you need by reading the question rather than feeling like you don’t know where to start. You are most likely writing a 7-10 page paper about something, not a report or overview. This means that you need to have a narrow scope, use your question to focus your research on a specific person, place, event, phenomenon, or time period.

  • Vague question: What do people like about true crime?
  • Broad question: What is the history of true crime?
  • Specific and focused question: What elements have contributed to the popularity of true crime podcasts with white women since 2020?

For example, let’s say our topic is student activism. You might expand your topic into any of the following research questions:

  • How does social media usage contribute to the effectiveness of student activism for Gen Z students?
  • How is the response to student activism on college campuses different today than it was during the Free Speech Movement?
  • How have activist influencers like Greta Thunberg impacted the number of elementary school students involved in environmental activism?

DIY Mind-Mapping (Video Tutorial)

This video tutorial will teach you how to find  you explore your topic further and develop a search strategy using mind-mapping:

2. Find Background Information

Background research is the exploratory research that you do before you start writing your paper or even finding the sources you’ll cite. The purpose of background research is to set you up for success with a refined research question and knowledge about the context of your topic.

Some reasons to do background research include:

  • Determining an appropriate scope for your research
  • Contextualizing your topic in the broader conversation, both scholarly and popular
  • Establishing the value of your research
  • Identifying experts and other important perspectives
  • Identifying important vocabulary that you may use as keywords to expand results or find more relevant results as you search

Questions to Ask

It helps to ask yourself the “big W” questions as you’re exploring your topic. Here are some useful questions to consider:

  • Who: Is there a specific population you want to focus on? Identify the stakeholders and their opinions.
  • Where: Where did it begin? Is there a geographic location you want to focus on?
  • When: Is there a particular time period that you want to focus on? When did it happen? When was the impact?
  • What: What is the issue, movement, event, etc.? Why does it matter? What else has it impacted?

Background Information Sources

3. Develop Your Research Plan

Library databases like BU Libraries Search work best when you use a technique called keyword searching. This type of searching is different than using a tool like Google where you can put a full research question in the search bar and still get results. Keyword searching requires a little more preparation, but your results will be highly relevant to your question and this is a skill that you can bring to Google and every other database to improve your search results!

What to Know

  • Keywords are unique terms that you type into the search bar
  • Good keywords help you find resources for your project
  • Generate keywords by identifying core concepts from your research question (i.e. time, place, event, media, people)

Generating Keywords Example

Research Topic

  • Urban Green Spaces

Initial Research Question

  • How does urban green space impact the mental and physical health of local residents?

Background Information

  • Who: Residents of Boston and BU students, specifically on the Charles River Campus
    • Keywords: Boston, Boston University, student, students, college students, Charles River, residents, locals
  • Where: The Charles River Esplanade, Cambridge
    • Keywords: Charles River, Cambridge, Boston, esplanade
  • When: Over the last decade
    • Keywords: Covid-19, pandemic, 21st century, Millennials, generation Z, gen-Z
  • What: University student mental health, The Wellbeing Project at BU, environmentalism
    • Keywords: urban green space, mental health, physical health, wellbeing, stress, self-care, environment, environmentalism, walking, cycling

Refined Research Question

  • How has the increase in urban green spaces like the Charles River Esplanade impacted the mental and physical health of local university students over the last decade?

Potential Searches in BU Libraries Search might look like “green space” AND university AND health, or “urban green space” AND Boston AND students

Try it Yourself!

You can use BU Libraries Search or any of our online databases to try out your new research skills.

A useful tool to use for generating keywords is the University of North Carolina Wilmington Library’s My Research Strategy, which helps you go from your research question to a search that you can copy and paste into BU Libraries Search.

UNCW Library’s My Research Strategy

Search Hacks

Advance your search skills by using search hacks to combine your keywords in library databases. These tricks work in Google and other search interfaces at all, so once this skill is in your toolbox, you’re ready to level up all your searches.

All examples will relate to the research topic: How does urban green space impact the mental and physical health of local residents?

Search Hack Example Explanation
AND “green space” AND “mental health” All results will include both the terms green space and mental health.
OR community OR resident All results will include either the keyword community, resident, or both keywords. This is a great tool to use when there are synonyms for one of your keywords.
NOT “green space” NOT rural Results will include the words “green space” and will exclude any resources with the word rural. This is a great way to eliminate irrelevant results.
“Quotation marks” “urban green space” The words inside the quotation marks will be searched in the exact order that they are written.
(Parentheses) (community OR resident) AND “mental health” The operation in the parentheses is prioritized. For this example, the search would be performed as follows: (community AND “mental health”) OR (resident AND “mental health”)
* Asterisk urban* – urbanize, urbanized, urbanization

residen* – resident, residential

 The asterisk is a wildcard. Put it after the root of a word and the database will search for any completion of that word.

Generate Keywords (Video Tutorial)

 

4. Understanding Source Types

With so many source types available in the library, how do you know which is right for your topic? In this step, we will highlight common source types you might use in your research.

You can use books to find background and contextual information about your topic. Scholarly books can be hundreds of pages long, therefore can cover a large amount of information. Books generally take longer to be published and edited than journal articles, so they’re able to cover a longer-term look at a topic and cover both general and deep information. Book Chapters are also an excellent option for finding detailed information about your topic. You can use book chapters in a similar way as you might utilize an article or journal. *Hint* use the index (or ctrl + F) to identify important pages and chapters!

How to Find Books & eBooks

To find books and eBooks in the BU Libraries collections, use BU Libraries Search. Enter some keywords describing your research topic in the search bar and select the Books option to narrow your results to only books and eBooks.

BU Libraries Search

How and Why to Use Different Source Types (Video Tutorial)

Directed by Karly Stark. Written & narrated by Jen Brown. Editorial & directorial contributions from Gisèle Tanasse.

5. Evaluate Your Sources

During your research process, you’ll engage with a variety of sources. Before you decide to use any individual resource in your paper, you will want to consider two factors: reliability and value.

Reliability

  • Do I trust this?
    • Is this author knowledgeable about the subject?
    • Has this been vetted and edited enough to ensure the content is accurate?
  • Is it accurate?
    • Is this current enough that it isn’t missing any major recent developments?
    • How was the research conducted?
    • Do those methods make sense?

Value

  • Why do I need this information?
  • How am I going to use it?
  • Does it help answer my research question?

Use these questions in combination with the evaluation strategies above to determine whether and how to use information in your research project. Keep in mind what sources are useful depends on what questions you’re asking!

Evaluation Basics

Here is a quick guide to consider when evaluating any source:

  • Expertise: Who wrote this? What kind of expertise do they have?
  • Purpose: Why was this created? Who is the intended audience?
  • Currency: When was this published?
  • Documentation: What sources do they cite?
  • Understanding Bias: What might the author’s biases be and how does that impact the source? What might my biases be and how does that impact my searching?
  • Power: In what format was this resource published? What communities does the author belong to?
  • Relevance: How is it relevant to your research topic? What information can I use from this source to answer my research question?

6. Write & Cite

After you’ve completed these steps, you are now ready to begin writing your research paper.