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POLI_SCI_368: Political Economy of Development (Karakoc)

Gather background, reviews, overviews. Find definitions, bibliographies

Somewhere in between your initial idea and settling on a research question, you'll need to do background research on how scholars in a particular subject area have discussed your topic. You may find background research in your textbook or class readings, academic books in the library's collection, or reference sources.

Use NU Search to browse for books, reference entries, and periodicals to build background information.

 

After you have an initial project idea and gathered some background and definitions, you can think deeper about the idea.

  • What do you want to know about this topic?
  • Which specific subset of the topic you can focus on? Specific demographic groups, people, places, times
  • Are there interventions or variables you want to explore?
  • Is there something about this topic that is not already addressed in scholarship?
  • Is there a relationship you can explore:
    • cause/effect
    • compare/contrast
    • current/historical
    • group/individual
    • opinion/reason
    • problem/solution

How do you move from a research question to searching in a database? You first have to pick out keywords from your research question.