Define your Research Topic (info)

Define your Research Topic

Your research statement contains the major elements of the topic you are investigating. When you define your research statement you will want to find a balance between choosing a topic that is too broad or too narrow.

It helps at this early stage of your research process for example, Transport costs in land locked countries, is an example of a broad research topic. There are entire books written on these subjects.

To obtain more targeted information, you will need to think about looking at just one aspect of this topic. For example:

What studies have been done on transport cost?

What features make a country land locked?

What are the elements used in transport cost?

Depending on the context of your research, you may want to narrow your topic further. The sooner you can develop a broad subject into a focused topic, the sooner you can shape your research.

A topic that covers too much material is a common problem for students. Depending on your interests, a general topic can be focused in many ways. In this case, the above the topic can be written as relationship between haulage transport cost and land locked countries.

It is very important to identify key concepts in the process of refining your research topic.