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*Effective Health Science Searching: Narrowing a Topic

Effective Health Science Searching

Narrowing a Research Topic

Introduction 

One common challenge when writing a research paper is narrowing down your topic. Once you have a rough idea of a topic, narrowing it down to a specific question will make it easier to find relevant research. Research is a search for answers, and a specific question will guide you in this process.   

Think of narrowing your topic as working down a pyramid: at the start, you have all possible topics, and then you keep narrowing your topic until it focuses on a question you can answer.

All possible topics
Chosen Topic
Narrowed Topic
Further Narrowed Topic
Research question

This process can be the most challenging part of doing research, but once you have a realistically scoped question (not too broad, not too narrow), it will guide the rest of your work.   

While it's essential to consider various approaches to studying the research problem, you will need to narrow the focus of your investigation early on. This way, you avoid the risk of attempting to cover too much in one paper.

Techniques to narrow your question

When tackling a research project, it's crucial to refine your question to make it more manageable and focused.

Here are some effective techniques to narrow your research question:

Choose one lens through which to view the research problem, or look at just one facet of it

Example: rather than studying the treatment of breast cancer, look at the use of radiation to treat breast cancer in women under 45 
Determine if one aspect of your topic can be broken into smaller parts, which can then be analyzed more precisely.   

Example: a study of tobacco use among adolescents can focus on just chewing tobacco rather than all forms of usage or, rather than adolescents in general, focus on female adolescents in a specific age range who choose to use tobacco.  
Generally, the smaller the geographic unit of analysis, the more narrow the focus.  

Example: rather than studying burnout amongst health professionals look at burnout in a pediatric unit or just with medical imaging technicians
Population characteristics provide a rich source of data for narrowing your research focus. Delve into demographic factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, type of health care worker, or health condition.  

Example: rather than looking at the impact of therapy animals on people, look at the impact of therapy animals on collage students stress levels.

But avoid getting too narrow

Be careful about getting too specific with your research question. Not every question that you come up with will be searchable.

The bottom line is that you will be working toward a balanced research question that is specific enough to guide your research but not too restrictive.

Below are some common problems with research questions

The question is too broad to be manageable.

For example:
History of therapy animals in hospitals.

Instead you could try:
How can therapy animals be used by health care professionals to help patients with autism when undergoing imaging tests?
Sometimes the narrowness is logical (such as there being an easily obtainable "right" answer)

For example:
Does smoking lead to cancer? (The answer is "yes." That doesn't make for much of a paper)

Instead you could try:
Are female non-smokers with daily exposure to secondhand smoke likely to develop breast cancer when compared with female non-smokers without daily exposure to secondhand smoke?
Sometimes this is because of a logical problem in the question, because the information needed to answer the question cannot be logically or legally obtained.

For example:
How many patients are admitted to hospitals to treat heart attacks every year?

Instead you could try:
Among males over the age of fifty what are the best factors for reducing hospital admissions for heart attacks?
Topics about Five local spefific geographic area may not be answerable with scholarly articles

For example:
Has the increase in bike lane infustruture in Victora, BC cause an increase in the number of people biking?

Instead you could try:
What can the city of Victoria do to increase the number of people who commute using bikes?
If a topic is quite recent, books or journal articles may not be available, but newspaper or magazine articles may. Also, websites related to the topic may or may not be available.

For example:
Directly after an election in which a new party is voted into power it would be difficult to find any schoalrly articles which research how the new parties policies might affect health care.

Instead you could try:
Focus on an an election that happened five-ten years ago and ask the same question.

For example

Migraine pain is a very broad topic, but by adding the component of just looking at treating pain without drugs it narrows the topic considerably. Additionally, adding the population characteristic of adults (aged 19-44) further refines the topic. 

All possible topics
Migraine Pain
Non-drug treatment of
migraine pain
Non-drug treatment of
migraine pain in adults
Are non-drug therapies
effective at
treating migraine
pain in
adults?

Next step

Hopefully, now you have a narrow question you can use to guide your research. However, you might need to change your topic as you begin searching. 

You can review the information about PICO questions or move on to the information about keywords.

Credit Statement: The information on this page was reused under creative commons licensees from Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research, The Michener Institute of Education Writing Tips and Tricks : Developing Research Questions Guide. The information on this page was also adapted with permission from the University of Southern California's Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper Guide and ASU Research Success for High School Students. ChatGPT version 4.0 was used to help develop the upsidedown triangles.

Material is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.