This post has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can create a post or quiz. Try making your own!

Posted on Feb 1, 2016

Choosing A Topic: 5 Easy Steps

Because your research project can't be about all the things.

by Engl203Diva

Community Contributor

Eventually, your research topic will have to be very specific.

Climate change is not a specific topic. Engineering solutions to offset the negative effects of global climate change and new developments in green energy technologies that could aid the U.S. in decreasing its dependence on non-renewable energy sources (which a student of mine wrote about last semester) is a specific topic.

However, it's not a bad idea to start with climate change and narrow your focus as the semester progresses.

My former student, an engineering major who is passionate about preventing global climate change, started off knowing that he wanted to look at climate change from and engineering perspective. His topic got more and more specific as he continued to think about and research it.

The best way to decide what kind of topic you might want to write about is to see what topics other people have already written on.

Say your general topic is therapy and you've searched for types of therapy, therapy techniques, etc.

You might find that a lot of researchers have written about cognitive-behavioral therapy or family therapy. If a lot of people have written about a subject, that means it's a subject that experts in your field are interested in.

You can always add your perspective to the conversation!

You might also find that some researchers talk about less common types of therapy, like play therapy or animal-assisted therapy. New ideas, theories, and practices will have less research written about them, so it will be hard to know if the information you find about them is accurate or not.

However, some of the most original and interesting papers come from exploring an uncommon topic!

If you do find a subject that interests you during your research, try to find more information about it. See if the author of a source you found particularly interesting has written anything else on the subject. Take some keywords or phrases from the source and put them into an academic database search engine.

For example, if you find an interesting book about animal-assisted therapy (incorporating animals into therapy sessions), you might put the phrase "animal-assisted therapy" into Academic Search Complete. That would give you articles on using animal-assisted therapy with veterans, people with intellectual disabilities, prison inmates, and young adults with drug addictions.

The ancient Greek philosopher, scientist, and rhetorician Aristotle (pictured above) came up with five topoi or topics to help figure out what to say about a subject: definition, comparison, relationship, circumstance, and authority.

Conveniently, you can use the common topics as questions:

* Definition: What is X? What are its parts?

For example, what is burnout? What are the symptoms of burnout?

* Comparison: How is X like Y? How are they different?

For example, is burnout similar to or different from job dissatisfaction?

* Relationship: What causes X? Did X cause Y? Did Y simply come before X but not cause it?

For example, does age affect burnout? Do younger medical professionals burn out more quickly than older ones? Does burnout lead to quitting the medical profession? Or are there other factors that make people quit?

* Circumstance: Is X possible? Is it probable? What else was going on at the same time?

For example, if a nurse is young and hasn't been on the job long, how likely is it that he can avoid experiencing burnout? What if he also does yoga and gets eight hours of sleep a night?

* Authority: What do witnesses say about X? What do experts say about X?

This is essentially the Aristotelian way of saying, "Research, research, research!" (See Step 2).

If you take a topic and answer all of these questions, you'll come up with some new subtopics that you might want to research.

Don't worry about using all the information you generate, though. In your research project, you could spend a lot of time talking about the causes and effects of burnout, but not a lot of time comparing burnout to anything else.

A good way to make a general topic more specific is to think like a reporter.

That doesn't require putting on a trilby hat and adopting 1940s slang (although it can if you want it to); all it requires is asking who, what, where, and when questions about your topic.

* Who: Who is involved with your topic? Whom does it affect?

For example, the increasingly automated workforce involves people who design and make automatons, people who currently or used to do jobs that are now being or could soon be done by an automated workforce, and the managers and owners of businesses and organizations that are using or might use an automated workforce.

* What: This is the same as Aristotle's common topic of definition! How is your topic defined? What are its subcategories?

For example, an automated workforce refers to automatons that perform tasks that were previously performed by a human workforce. Types of automated workforce include computer-aided manufacturing, numerically controlled equipment, and robots.

* Where: What places does this topic affect? What places could you focus on?

For example, you could write about workforce automation in the US and Canada or in Europe, keeping in mind that a survey of North American and European executives showed that European executives are more open to the idea. Once you've chosen a continent, you can even choose a specific country.

* When: How long has your topic been an issue? How long will it be an issue? What age groups does it affect?

For example, machines have been replacing people's jobs since the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Europe and North America (and groups like the Luddites were none too happy about it). Workforce automation will become increasingly more important in the near future, as it seems likely that more and more companies will start automating their workforce as much as possible.

Again, as with the common topics, this is just to give you ideas. You don't have to use all the information you generate in your research project.

I wonder if Miley Cyrus sometimes wishes she could start all over again.

In any case, when it comes to choosing a research topic, you definitely can and should.

Choosing a topic that is interesting to you, relates to your major or future job, has existing research written on it, and can turn into a ten-ish page paper is not an easy task. Don't feel like you have to commit to something right away.