Narrowing a Topic
Once you have a general topic you'll need to turn this topic into a specific research question.
If the focus of your question is too broad you can easily get overwhelmed with the amount of information you find. How can you narrow your topic?
One way is to ask questions: Who? What? Why? Where? When?. Use our Developing a Research Question worksheet to help you narrow your own topic. For more information, visit the Choosing a Topic page of our Research Hub.Developing Keywords
Once you have your research question, the next step is developing a set of keywords to use when searching the databases. Check out the video below from John Jay College to learn more about how to develop effective keywords.
Finding Peer Reviewed Sources
Every database has a Peer Review filter in the column next to the search results (see image). Checking this filter will limit your results to only include Peer Reviewed articles.
Not sure what "Peer Review" means? Check out our introduction to scholarly sources and the Peer Review process in SFC Library Research Hub.