Academic & Professional Communications
Choose your topic
For this unit you need to choose a topic associated with your discipline in the form of:
How [your chosen professional or industry person/organisation/text] influenced the [discipline/profession]
Start by thinking about key people/organisations/texts in your field of study. If you need some ideas, look at the example topics provided in your assignment outline or try a broad keyword search in Google or Google Scholar.
Once you have found a topic of interest in your discipline, you can begin to develop your research question.
Develop your question
Your research question will form the basis of your search strategy. As you develop your question, you will need to consider the amount and type of information available. Keep in mind that if your research question is too narrow it may be difficult to find enough scholarly information for your assignment. If it is too broad you may become overwhelmed by the amount of literature.
One way to get a quick overview of resources on your question is to conduct a preliminary search in the Curtin Library catalogue using keywords from your topic.
Is your topic too recent?
It takes time to develop and disseminate scholarly content. Events which have occurred recently (in the last few months/year) will be unlikely to have much (if any) scholarly research available. You may need to alter your topic to look at the broader issue.