Research guides: EESC24 Advanced Readings in Environmental Science: Narrowing Your Topic

Narrowing a Topic

This short video demonstrates to students how to develop an appropriate topic for a research paper by considering goals, approaches, topic scope and helpful resources (Georgian College Library, 2016).

Transcript (PDF)

Example: Narrowing a Topic on Environmental Antibiotics

Why Narrow Your Topic?

• Helps to define your topic to a manageable scope

• Allows you to identify a problem that can guide your searching

Broad Topic:

Environmental Antibiotics

Still Broad:

Environmental antibiotics and waste management

Narrowed but still a bit broad:

Environmental antibiotics and waste management and hospitals

Narrowed Topic:

Waste management of environmental antibiotics of hospitals in Canada.

Concept Mapping

Some people find brainstorming techniques such as concept mapping to be helpful. Concept maps are linked nodes of concepts or ideas; the linking arrows demonstrate connections between nodes.

Source: “concept_map_lrg,” jean-louis zimmermann

There are tons of different software options available to assist with concept mapping.

Here are a few browser-based tools to get you started:

Bubble.us
Creates colourful bubbles for different concepts. Users can export their files in different formats.
Coggle
Free web based platform. Requires a Google account. Allows multiple people to collaborate on a map. Share links to maps and download/export maps as PDF or PNG file.
Mindup
Free web based platform. Does not require an account but can be added to a Google account. Multiple ways to share or export your map (can even export as a Freemind file).