Background Reading

It’s wise to do some more reading about that narrower topic once you have it. For one reason, you probably don’t know much about it yet. For another, such reading will help you learn the terms used by professionals and scholars who have studied your narrower topic. Those terms are certain to be helpful when you’re looking for sources later, so jot them down or otherwise remember them.

For instance, if you were going to do research about the biology of the pandemic virus known as COVID, this background reading would teach you that professionals and scholars often refer to the virus itself as SARS-CoV-2. If you didn’t learn and use that in your eventual search for sources, you would miss the kinds of sources you’ll need for your assignment—sources written by people in a position to know about virus biology, unlike the general public.

Most sources other than journal articles are good sources for this initial reading, including the New York Times or other mainstream American news outlets, Wikipedia, encyclopedias, dictionaries, discipline-specific manuals (such as the DSM-5 for psychology students), handbooks, blogs, and web pages that could be relevant. The reason journal articles are not helpful at this stage of your reading is that they are usually much more specific and difficult to understand than you need. An article from the American Heart Association’s “Science News” Page about heart disease and exercise will give you plenty of information to help you understand the condition rather than a 35 page clinical study publication with more details than you know what to do with.

This initial reading could cause you to narrow your topic further. While narrower topics lead to greater specificity for what you have to find out, avoid having your topic be too narrow as it can be difficult to find relevant sources later. After this upfront work, you’re ready to start developing the research question(s) you will try to answer for your assignment.