Choosing a Topic

Selecting a Topic

“Research is simply gathering the information you need to answer a question and thereby help you solve a problem.” (Booth, et al. The Craft of Research, 6)

Asking Questions about Your Topic

The process of selecting a topic will vary according to writing project. Some projects will have a pre-selected topic; others (like a dissertation) will be more fully determined by your own interests and purposes. Regardless of the source of your topic, it is important that you begin a research paper by asking a number of questions about your topic.

First some basic conceptual questions: What is of interest to you, what problems do you want to address, and what questions do you want to answer? What might be the value of any answers your come to in your research paper? This second question asks about the rationale for your paper and very often goes unasked and unanswered by authors.

Articulating Your Topic

In their book on The Craft of Research (p. 44), Wayne Booth, et. al. suggest that the process of questioning your topic should result in a statement like the following: “I am studying ______, because I want to find out who/how/why _______, in order to understand how/why what ______.

E.g., "I am studying the history of the modern interpretation of John 14:6 ("I am the way the truth and the life"), because I want to find out how Christians after the Enlightenment interpreted this verse's exclusionary claims in light of other religions, in order to understand how Christians have attempted to balance exclusionary traditions and inclusionary experiences in the modern world."

E.g., "I am studying C.S. Lewis' definition of the types of Christian love, because I want to find how it is similiar with the pope's recent encyclical on Christian love, in order to understand how love might be a basis for Protestant/Christian dialogue."

Alongside these conceptual questions come logistical questions: Is my topic too broad for the assigned length of my paper? Is my topic sufficiently specific to let me research a reasonable amount of information? Will I be able to find enough resources to write this paper?

E.g., "My paper should be only 10 pages, so perhaps I should focus on the modern interpretation of John 14:6 by Rudolf Bultmann?"

Assessing Your Topic

The reality is that the process of selecting and researching a topic is a dialectical process requiring a progressive back and forth between selecting your topic and determining what resources already exist on your topic. If you are writing a term paper, you will usually want to select a topic for which there already exists a sufficiently developed body of research. Your specific question or problem may be a unique spin on a traditional topic, but you will want to identify enough authoritative books and articles to carry on a rich dialogue with your sources in your paper.

One approach to selecting to a topic that is original, but which also has relevant and sufficient sources for your research, is to use a comparative research approach, topical triangulation. In this approach, a researcher in one field (e.g. Church History), searches the recent literature published in another field (e.g., Classical Studies), and questions whether the topics and/or approaches of this “outside” literature might be profitably applied to the history and texts in ones own field of study. This triangulation of topics, if successful, will result in an “original” topic or method in one field of study, which has resources for research in another field of study.

E.g., "I see that the Oxford, Cambridge and Brill Presses have published a number of books recently on _______ in the modern world; how might this approach be applied to the texts I have been reading for class?"

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Last Updated: 4/11/2006