When you first start your research, you don't have to have all of the answers. That's why you are doing research!
The first step, once you have your information need -- in this case a research paper for a class -- is to do a little bit of research to better understand the topic and what you might want to learn. We call this pre-research.
You're not looking for sources to use yet - you're just trying to learn more about your topic and find keywords to help you do more focused research later.
You might start by searching your topic on Google. That's helpful if you are unfamiliar with your topic and need to learn about it more before you can move on to creating a research question or finding sources.
If you don't have a topic yet, that's ok! We have resources for that too.
For your History research paper, US History (Gale In Context) is a good database to start with to find a topic, get background information, identify helpful keywords, and find primary sources. Just click the Browse Topics button to get started!
