Here at the beginning, you may be working with a topic that has been given to you as part of a college or high school class assignment or a topic that you have chosen as part of an assignment. Or, you may be dealing with a topic of particular interest that has come your way via a doctor's appointment, something you heard on the news, an article you read in a newspaper or magazine, etc.
Step 1 of the Strategy involves deciding what you actually want to find out about the topic and how you will really use any information that you eventually gather.
In order to do that, you need to take a few minutes and think about what you need or hope to accomplish.
For example, for a class assignment, you might ask yourself the following questions:
- What kind of an assignment have I been given?
- Is my paper expected to be of a certain approximate length (2-3 pages, 5-7 pages, 7-10 pages, 20-30 pages, etc.)?
- How long is my presentation expected to last (5 minutes, 15 minutes, 20-30 minutes, etc.)?
- Has my teacher asked me to use certain types of information (for instance, research-oriented/scholarly or primary sources rather than popular press sources)?
- What is the purpose of the assignment?
- What is the expected audience?
Or, for a topic involving a more personal interest, you might think about the following:
- What is the question that I want to answer?
- How much do I need to know about this topic? Everything? Or, just enough to answer my question and understand that answer?
- What kind of information am I looking for? Information that I can understand? Or, information that I may not be able to understand well myself but that I can take to another person who would be able to understand that information and then explain it to me?
As you can see, the considerations prompted by the questions above will largely determine the type and amount of information that you need to gather.
In fact, you may find it necessary to modify or define--by either narrowing or expanding--the topic you begin with in order to make it work effectively given the specifics of your assignment or the particular question that you need to answer.
One useful way to define a topic is by gathering some authoritative and understandable overview information about it. What you need here is not a book or a long article but rather a concise, easily-understandable summary of the topic--something that will assist you to quickly learn more about that topic and the various important parts of the topic. Why? Because one of those parts (narrower in scope than the full topic) may end up working well as the ultimate topic of the assignment or as the focus for the question you want to answer.
Some useful sources to help define topics:
- Encyclopedias (general and subject-specific) --
This is a major purpose of encyclopedias. They usually cannot tell you the most current information about a topic and also usually cannot cover a topic in great depth. What they can do though is give you a fairly concise, understandable overview that can quickly acquaint you with the topic, its important parts, the broader subjects to which it is related, the names of individuals and places associated with the topic, keywords and phrases useful when searching indexes and abstracts (see Step 2) for further information about the topic, and so on.
- Likely publications to begin with:
- McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology
A high-quality encyclopedia with an emphasis, as the title implies, on scientific and technological topics; the most current edition is the 9th published in 2002.
For getting an authoritative, concise overview of a relevant topic, this encyclopedia would be a good first choice.
Each edition of this encyclopedia is updated--on an annual basis--by the McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science & Technology. The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology and associated products are also available online in a product called AccessScience. You may wish to check and see if a local library provides access to this resource.
- Encyclopedia Britannica [Grinnell]
Perhaps the most scholarly and best of the general English-language encyclopedias.
Besides the well-known print version of this encyclopedia, an electronic version of Encyclopedia Britannica--Britannica Online--is available over the Internet; you may wish to check and see if a local library provides access to the online version.
- Other Sources --
Encyclopedias are not the only place where useful and understandable overview information may be obtained. Other potential sources could include textbooks and articles that appear in more popularly-oriented magazines like Scientific American, Science News, New Scientist, and other similar publications (how to identify those articles? See Step 2: Identify).
How to find the above encyclopedias and/or magazines? See Step 3: Locate for details.
Step 1 of the Strategy can ultimately help decrease the amount of time you spend gathering information (by focusing your efforts on a specific topic that fits well the assignment you've been given or the question you want to answer) and thus help increase the amount of time you will have to read and evaluate the information you have gathered and then write your paper, prepare your presentation, or answer your question--the part of the process where you should be spending the most time.
Questions? Please let me know.
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