Linguistics: Choose a Topic

General approaches to choosing a linguistics research topic:

• Personal interest: If feasible, concentrate your efforts on a topic that interests you personally (e.g., bilingual education; English and the immigrant community; history of the English language). Think creatively. Personal interest increases motivation, which in turn often predicts success.

• Brainstorm: Identify synonyms for major concepts (e.g., Applied Linguistics = Language Services). Those "keywords" will come in handy when searching databases such as JSTOR for journal articles about your topic.

• Mindmap: A concept or mindmap uses shape, color, and other visual cues to help researchers think through a research topic. Check out this video for a good example of a mindmap in action. Consult your smart phone's app store for free and low-cost mindmapping apps.

• Explore: Identify important linguists and disciplinary trends. Read, for example, about the careers of well-known linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Noam Chomsky (1928- ), or William Labov (1927- ); follow the trajectory of an important theory or school of thought such as generativism or universal grammar; and/or concentrate on developments in the field of linguistics during a particular decade such as the 1960s. You can do all of this and more using the sources listed on the Reference Shelf page of this libguide.

• Consult an Expert: Linguistics students must engage with the scholarly secondary literature. Why not begin with an expert who already knows that literature or can help you to identify it? Your professor or librarian can help you to choose a topic and suggest relevant readings.

Library-centric approaches to reviewing the literature and refining your research topic:

• Citation (or Footnote) Chasing: A popular research technique in which the bibliographies of works already located in a literature search (or assigned by your professor) are examined for additional sources containing further information. Books (monographs), journal articles, and scholarly encyclopedia articles all typically contain bibliographies. Footnote chasing is a favorite of many scholars but it is not the only or even most efficient method of reviewing the literature and choosing/narrowing your research topic. Although moderately time consuming, footnote chasing can pay huge dividends to the researcher.

• Consult Reference Works: Reference works list, index, summarize, or in some other way facilitate access to the primary literature of linguistics. Examples of important reference works in linguistics include the encyclopedias listed in the Reference Shelf and Find Articles and Journals pages of this guide.

• Abstracting and Indexing Databases (subset of Reference): Abstracting and indexing databases are tertiary sources that provide bibliographic citations and/or abstracts of the literature of a discipline (e.g., LLBA for linguistics). Print indexes (and their online analogs) employ controlled vocabularies or subject headings to help researchers understand the nature of the content indexed and to efficiently pinpoint the most relevant material. See the Find Articles and Journals page of this guide for links to important indexes and databases in linguistics.

• Published Bibliographies (subset of Reference): A bibliography is a systematic list of works written on a given subject, or that share one or more common characteristics of language, form, period, place of publication, author, and so on. A bibliography can be comprehensive, encompassing for example the entire discipline of linguistics, or selective, covering only the scholarly literature on a narrow aspect of second language acquisition. The Reference Shelf tab of this guide provides links to several important linguistics bibliographies.

• Browse the Secondary Literature: Browse the latest issue of a peer-reviewed linguistics journal. While this method is much more time consuming than searching abstracting and indexing databases, use it to identify recent disciplinary problems and debates. Find linguistics journals in the Find Articles and Journals page of this guide.

Source for definitions: ODLIS: Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science