Academic research (its not that bad)

Hello again everyone I hope your finding your topic even more fruitful than you originally thought. By now you may have already done some research and Kudos to you! your ahead of the game. however whether you have or haven't started your research this next exercise should expand your horizons even further. Have you found it hard to narrow down your sources? after all "torture" is such a broad topic your bound to get millions of hits. I have found it incredibly helpful to make a list of keywords on your topic, starting broad and narrowing each word down to something more specific. In fact for tonight's exercise that's exactly the first step

Step 1- develop and try new keywords and combinations to narrow down your search results.

Take my rough inquiry question regarding skateboarding for example: How has the way society views skateboarding changed and why do some places pass laws to not allow it?

Start by pulling three keywords together: Skateboarding  Laws Society- now break those down into synonyms or variations of the terms:       Extreme sports Rules Community
                                                                  Athletes/pros   Regulations Stereotypes

Step 2: Sometimes different search engines will understand terms differently and therefore return different results. Try searching several engines at the same time using different variations of your search terms. Don't forget to save your results

Step 3: Time to do a little exploring. Noodletools can be an incredible tool and advantage to an online researcher! visit www.noodletools.com, there you will find a link titled " Choose the Best Search" follow that link and you will come to a page with a list of search engines both generic and specialized. Every handful or so of search engines are grouped into certain criteria's depending on what you might be searching for. Try as many as you can and as before don't forget to save all of your results.

I hope this has helped you narrow down your topic and find some new detailed information about it. Thanks for playing along and as always...

Explore on!