How to Choose and Narrow a Research Topic
Picking the right topic early saves you hours of frustration later. Here’s a practical process for choosing a topic and adjusting it once you start researching.
Choosing a Topic
- Start with your interests. If your instructor gives you freedom to choose, pick something you actually want to spend time learning about — your paper will be stronger for it.
- Do quick preliminary research. Before committing, search your topic in the library databases (Gale Academic OneFile and ProQuest Central are good starting points) to make sure there’s enough published material to work with.
- Brainstorm around it. Use the basic who/what/where/when/why prompts, and try a simple three-column list: what you know, what you think you know, and what you still need to find out.
Search ANU Library databases
Narrowing or Broadening Your Topic
It’s normal for your topic to shift once you start researching — that’s a sign you’re actually engaging with the material, not a problem.
To narrow a topic that’s too broad, add a specific limiter:
- A time period (“…since the 2021 policy change”)
- A population (“…among first-time nursing home residents”)
- A setting (“…in outpatient clinics specifically”)
Example: “Electronic health records” is too broad for most class papers. Narrowed: “The impact of electronic health record adoption on documentation time for nurses in small rural clinics.”
To broaden a topic that’s too narrow (you can’t find enough sources):
- Remove one of your filters (drop the specific location or date range)
- Use a more general search term and work backward from there
Quick Self-Check
Before you commit to a topic, ask:
- Can I find at least 4–5 credible sources on this exact angle?
- Can I say what my paper will argue in one sentence?
- Is this narrow enough to cover well in the page count I have?
Next: turn your topic into a research question
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