RESEARCH TUTORIAL CONTENTS

Select a Topic

Find Background Information

Find Books

Find Articles

Find Web Sites

Evaluating Web Sites

Citing Sources
MLA
APA
Chicago (Turabian)

Get Help

Before you begin your research -- for books, articles and web sites -- it's a good idea to take a few minutes to analyze your topic and generate a list of main concepts and keywords. You will use these to search:

• Indexes and tables of contents of books
• Library catalogs for books and other media
• Periodical databases for articles
• The Internet for web sites

Let's say you've decided to research eating disorders and you've focused your topic as:

The relationship between images of women in the mass media and eating disorders among women and girls.

Step 1: Identify the main concepts.
The key concepts would be: "images of women", "mass media" and "eating disorders."

Step 2: Develop a list of alternate or related terms for each main concept.
Why? Because different authors may use different terminology. For example, if you were researching alcohol use among teens, different authors may use different words for "teens." A more scholarly publication may use "adolescents" or "juvenile," while a magazine or newspaper might use "teen" or "teenager."

These main concepts and alternate terms will be the keywords that you use in searching catalogs, indexes, databases and the Web. If your created a concept map for your topic, you can refer to it to generate a list of concepts and keywords. Here's a chart showing the process for our sample topic:

	CONCEPT 1 images of women	CONCEPT 2 mass media	CONCEPT3 eating disorders
SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS	portrayal of women	magazines	bulimia
	advertising	television	anorexia
		movies
		music videos

As you progress through your research, you may add additional terms and names of people, organizations and events. You will discover which keywords work best for library catalogs, specific databases and the Web.

NEXT: Finding Background Information on Your Topic