Sometimes your problem isn't too much information but too little. In that case, your topic is likely too narrow. Use information, your topic may be too narrow, specialized, or current. Use these strategies to broaden your topic. For example, you might say you want to research "the negative educational effects of four-year olds eating the newest flavor of Cheetos." If it turns out you simply can't enough information on this narrow a topic, you could broaden it by:
Generalizing
- Instead of focusing just on four-year olds, or just on educational effects, focus on general negative effects of eating the newest flavor of Cheetos.
Currency
- Sometimes your topic is just too recent for there to be any existing research. In this case, you could do something like examine any previous studies about the negative effects of eating Cheetos (of any kind). If that's still too narrow, back up again and look at the negative effects of consuming corn-based snack foods.
Database Choice
- Occasionally the problem isn't that the information isn't out there; but that you're not looking in all the right places. If you want to consider effects of consuming snack foods on children's educational performance, consider looking at both health-focused databases like Gale Health & Wellness or MEDLINE, but also education research databases like ERIC.
Synonyms
- If important components of your research are known by different names, simply figuring that out can help broaden your research. Cheetos, for example, utilizes a food colorant sometimes called Red 40 Lake, Red 40 Aluminum Lake, or Allura Red AC. Searching with each of these terms would probably help broaden your research base.
