Step One: Define Your Topic

Topic ideas can come from a range of places. The class assignment itself, issues within your prospective field/career, or books, articles, websites, podcasts you have read/ listened to lately. Try using a process called 'Mind Mapping' to help get you started, you can use a piece of paper or the attached fillable form to work through the following steps:

3. Define your topic in one or two sentences. EXAMPLE: You read an article about online health check-ups becoming increasingly popular, but the article raised some questions for you about the quality of online medical care. You want to investigate how effective these appointments are for patients; a topic sentence may be "Effectiveness of online health checkups". 

4. Write down terms associated with the topic. EXAMPLE: You review the article and note that the author describes the movement with the terms "tele-health" and "tele-medicine" etc. 

5. Write down the people and populations who are impacted by your topic. EXAMPLE: Telehealth effectiveness would impact a range of populations including medical staff, patients such as senior, low-income rural populations 

6. Write down the field(s) that may be researching your own topic or question. EXAMPLE: Researchers in the health sciences as well as information technology and software designers creating platforms for tele-health appointments, both perspectives could help you gain insight into this topic. 

See the example below of this process: 

Step Two: Choose Your Search Tool Based on Your Mind Map

There are many places to search for articles in the online library and the wider internet. Search within a database (an online collection of library resources) to find freely available articles from all major newspapers, magazines as well as scholarly and professional articles.

• Databases are search tools that give you access to a collection of materials on a subject or material type and help you NARROW your search.
• Google Scholar will filter out commercial search results and searches BROAD range of topics. 

1. Use your mind map to choose the tool you use to start searching. Review who may be professionally researching your question/topic, you may need to think about the broadest category of researchers to pick the right subject database. EXAMPLE: There are no 'Healthcare' databases, but we have 'Health Sciences' databases. There are no Zoology databases (Study of the animal kingdom) but there are Science databases that includes articles on Zoology. You can also filter the A to Z list by "Material Type" to search in Newspaper or Journal article databases only.

2. Filter the list by subject, choose one of the 'Best Bets' or review database descriptions to find a good match

Step Three: Search Strategically with Keywords from Your Mind Map

Combine keywords/search terms from your mind map to search for articles on your chosen topic. Combine keywords using "AND", "OR", and "NOT" to help you better control the search and narrow or expand the results as needed.  

AND narrows a search, it will retrieve items pertaining to both topics. 

Example: "telehealth AND seniors" will retrieve materials that include both of these terms

NOT excludes unwanted topics. If your search continues to return results on something outside of the scope of your research you can excluded those results for a more targeted search

Example: "telehealth AND seniors NOT online therapy" will retrieve articles on telehealth senior, but not online therapy, a similar topic but not what you are researching

OR expands a your search results, you can ensure that similar terms or subjects are included in your search results. 

Example: "telehealth OR telemedicine AND patients" to retrieve materials that include either term since you know both are used to describe similar things related to your topic