Research and Documentation
Group Project Final
N. Sucre
Information Resource Proposal
Our group has decided to create an information resource that will provide a road map for students to follow in coming up with a research paper topic. As a group we initially intended to create a resource that would have been able to fulfill a similar function through its social connectivity, but under the professor’s instruction we decided to simplify the project’s scope. This resource is meant to be used by City Tech students that need a point of reference in developing a research topic that they will want to write about. There are many aspects to formulating the right research topic.
- Ensuring that it meets the professor’s requirements.
- Ensuring that it is of interest to the student.
- Ensuring that the research topic has sufficient information about it.
The common procedure for research paper topics and theses requires the student to assess what seems like either a world of options. This can be incredibly daunting which is why it is common for students to draw a blank when initially coming up with the concept for a research paper. Personally I tend to focus on the fact that I will have to spend a very large amount of time on this topic, so much so that if it was not something that I was somewhat interested in it would make the process too painful. Aside from that, choosing a poor topic will affect your grade and in the end, if you don’t choose a topic that you relate to, you end up not actually learning any intrinsically valuable information whatsoever. This is the lose-lose situation that out information resource aims to avoid.
Professors can also be the sources of research topic woes and often are. While the resource cannot change your professor, it can allow you not to rely on his or her ideas to refine your research paper. Ultimately the topic must be verified with the professor but it is understood that the professor may not have a grasp of your interests to provide you with a topic that you want. We would hope to implement into the site the ability to provide wider or narrower scopes of research topic paths and ideas. This will be probably the most difficult undertaking and may be left out completely.
The goal is to make the site act as a personal research consultant that will assist you in finding the topic that is right for you and the assignment that you are have.
As sources we have used; Cornell University suggestions for finding a research topic (Cornell University Library); Purdue Online Writing Lab suggestions for choosing a topic (Purdue OWL); The National Archives research by topic site (Archives.gov); also the Pros and Cons of Controversial Issues site (Procon.org).
Considering our sources the site will primarily have two sides to it, for the first we intend to use the Archives.gov site as a guide in the way that is categorizes topics into sub-categories such as events, people, places, arts and culture. But to fulfill our needs we will need to provide many different forms of research questions on the pages linked by those sub-categories. Each research topic would also have an estimate of how long the paper should be to do justice to the scope of the topic. The second side of the site will purely focus on giving the user tips to find the right topic. This is similar to the Purdue and Cornell sites in how it is structured. There is a large amount of room to work within considering that the site would provide so many potential research questions. As a result this section would range from addressing someone who has no clue about their topic to someone who has a specific need that is very difficult to satisfy.
The potential con of the site is that professors may believe that it shows a lack of creativity, as well they may not appreciate something that works against their usual steering of student research topics. But in the end this project has the potential to ease the research project pains of many students and professors if setup and used effectively.
