Finding and Exploring Your Topic: Understanding
Your Topic

The CQ Researcher publishes reports 44 times a year that offer in-depth single-topic coverage of political and social issues, with regular reports on topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy. Each CQ Researcher report is investigated and written by a seasoned journalist. Editors identify the topic to be investigated, then the writer conceives its content, formulating the key questions that it will seek to answer; reads background material; interviews a range of sources; synthesizes available information; and writes the report. The report's writer quotes a range of sources, including lawmakers, academics, interest group representatives, government officials as well as citizens involved in the issue. The report concludes with a bibliography that contains an annotated list of key sources.

Credo Reference provides access to full-text, aggregated reference content covering a variety of major subject areas. The database contains well over 3,000,000 full-text entries in over 500 reference books, collected from more than 70 publishers. The entries are drawn from encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographies, quotations, and other sources. Credo is designed as a research tool and provides the ability to search, map, save, organize, and cross-reference the information in the collection.

The resources on this page will help you find out background information about your topic.  You can use this information to further develop your paper's argument, or to learn enough about the topic to begin to narrow it down into a manageable paper topic.