How to Choose a Research Topic
One way to start choosing a topic is to identify multiple points of personal interest by looking at the news. For more ideas about current events or important issues you can browse books in the library, surf the web, talk with friends and family, listen to podcasts, poke around on Wikipedia, search academic encyclopedias online, or even watch YouTube videos.
Choose something you like! For example, one student found he could explore his interest in fantasy football one year by asking if it would one day become more popular than real-life football games. What fascinates you?
Conduct background research by looking for books or scholarly articles from the main search box on the library’s homepage. Narrow your topic into a manageable research question, to avoid a broad survey. Remember the point of research is ultimately to solve a problem; college papers typically only require a small number of pages, so a smaller piece of a larger problem is all you have time to discuss adequately. Find examples of research questions, links to browsing sites, brainstorming tools, and more on our Research Questions page of the Information Literacy at Idaho State University guide.
This fun video explains more about the topic selection process. Often, it takes a couple tries to formulate a good topic that is neither too broad, nor too narrow.