*Speech Research Guide*: Home

If you need help choosing a topic or finding keywords for your topic, try these databases.

Once you have a general topic for speech, these databases can help you focus it a bit more.

The Research Process

1. Identify your information need
2. Pre-research
3. Create a research statement or question
4. Develop a search strategy. Where will you look for information? This will depend on your information need.
5. Locate information
6. Evaluate sources
7. Revise search, find more sources, and evaluate
8. Answer question and cite sources

Keywords

Keywords are the words you use to find information on your topic. When you search databases, use specific keywords instead of questions.

Keep your keywords neutral so you don't bias your search results. For example, instead of social media AND negative effects, search social media AND effects.

If you need ideas for keywords:

• Do some pre-research on your topic. For example, skim the Overview for your topic in the database Opposing Viewpoints. Look for hyperlinked words, words in italics, and names of organizations, people, programs, or policies.
• Find an eBook about your topic and scan the index or the table of contents.
• Use the Subject Terms tool in a database like Academic Search Complete. This works like a thesaurus for the database.
• If you find one article you like, look at the keywords they use in the abstract or throughout the article.
• Do a Google search for your topic and jot down the ideas and keywords you see there, then take those keywords and search our databases.

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