6.2: Refine Your Topic

Quote

"Then I go in with, with a certain formulation of it but then as I explore conflicts in the literature space. It’s like the question often changes and, and morphs into a related but slightly different question. It’s quite associative? Yeah, yeah so it ends up forming a network like, like a neural net or something like that". (Graduate student participant as cited in Droog et al. 2024, p. 843)

Characterize Research on Your Topic

As with any mystery, once you've collected your clues, the next step is to step back and see what the bigger picture is. You might not have the full picture yet, but you can start to see what's known, what's still hidden, and where you might need more evidence.

Let's consider the patterns you found in Unit 5 more deeply.

Activity: Consider patterns \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. List some of the patterns you found in the previous unit.
2. What can you say about each pattern in a few sentences?
   1. What does the literature say?
   2. What do you feel about that?
   3. How does it connect to your topic?
3. Which patterns need more information?
4. Where there any patterns you didn't find any information about, but had hoped to find?

Complete the table below based on your answers to the above questions:

Table of thoughts on patterns

Pattern	Reflections on the literature	More sources needed?

In Section 5.2 Defining Literature Reviews, you read published literature reviews. You looked for what characterized their topics.

Now you'll start to characterize research on your topic based on the sources you read.

Example: Characterize research \(\PageIndex{1}\)

At this step in my research, I would have characterized research on the topic of grad students + research + affect as:

The research on this topic shows:

• Students experience research both cognitively and affectively
• More research focuses on the cognitive aspect
• Studies that focus on affect do not always define it. Several provide dimensions, which vary across studies, but can include emotions, motivation, values
• Studies are focused on undergrads, not grad students

I don't know enough yet to comment on methodology nor theory.

Activity: Characterize research on your topic \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Even though you've only read a few sources, consider how research on your topic is characterized.

Below are a few guiding questions to help prime your answers. Not all will be relevant, so focus on the ones that fit your research:

• What can you say about the different patterns you've seen?
• What seems to be lacking or missing?
• What do you think about the methodology used?
• What populations were studied? Who wasn't studied?
• What geography was covered?
• What theories were used?

If you wanted to tell someone in a few sentences about what you found so far, how could do so, succinctly?

Reflect

How easy was the above activity for you?

When I had only found a few sources for my topic, I'd found this very difficult because my sources were initially so disparate.

• I'd tried to narrow to graduate students, but couldn't find enough sources.
• When I broadened my search to just student affect, my sources were on too many different aspects, including student advising.
• I realized I needed to refine in a different way and decided that although my topic was still clearly about graduate students, I would search for (undergraduates or higher education or graduate students) + (affective domain) + (librarians or "library instruction" or "information literacy" or "library orientation").
  • In this way, I did broaden my searches, but not my topic.
  • I narrowed my topic to library instruction, which also helped narrow my searches.

If you also found it difficult to synthesize the patterns among your sources, your sources might also be covering too many different aspects. That's pretty common if you only read a handful of sources! Usually this simply means:

• Some of your sources might not be relevant to your topic; or
• You might need more sources to gain a more complete picture; or
• Your topic might be too broad or too murky

It's very likely that you will need more sources at this point. Before going back to the databases, consider first if anything about your topic shifted based on the sources you found.

Adjust Your Venn Diagram

Go back to the Venn diagram you drew for your topic. Now that you have an initial sense of what past literature has covered, is there anything you want to change about your topic?

• Perhaps you've become interested in a slightly different area and want to make some major shifts.
• Maybe you realize you were trying to cover too many aspects and you have a better sense now of which you do not want to include
• Maybe you added place holders to the Venn diagram initially, such as "benefits" or "impacts" or "barriers". But now you've seen some example of those in the literature and you want to change that bubble to one of the specifics. Maybe you add several circles for each of the different barriers, to see how they connect with different aspects of your topic. Some examples:
  • Benefits becomes "employment" or "stress reduction"
  • Barriers becomes "transportation" or "cost"
• Maybe you want to add a particular theoretical orientation

If nothing shifted for you, that's fine too!

Next Steps

In the next section, we'll use these patterns and reflections to find more sources.