Searching for Scholarly Articles

Brainstorm

The best way to pick a research topic is to allocate a plenty of time to brainstorm ideas.  Keep track and record the ideas in a document or log book for assessing later.

• What is the most interesting thing about the topic or idea you may have?
• Do you have any personal experience in the topic? If so, how significant is that in the discipline.
• What course work is related to the topic and how interesting was that to you? Was there any question unanswered for you?
• Have you read any interesting article or information related to the topic?
• What is currently happening in the area of your interest?

Once you select a topic of discussion, the next step is to identify possible keywords related to the topic.

Breakdown your topic or research idea into concepts and think about synonyms and possible terms.

What is a key term?

A key term is a word which you believe needs to be in the article.

Consider this term/word may have other related words or like terms (synonyms) that can be in an article and you would be interested in reading it.

Where do you get key term(s)?

Begin by using your assignment or/and the topic of interest. Do not place all terms in at once!

Drop all unnecessary words like small words "a,"  "the," "kind," "compare," "and," "perhaps," etc. If you use these words, you are saying "I want this in my article," but are these details necessary to have. You only need the essential word(s) or term(s). 

Where can you get more terms?

There are several places to look 

1. Use mind mapping with Credo reference
2. The dictionary
3. The thesaurus
4. The encyclopedia
5. Your textbook

Now you are beginning to brainstorm.