In addition to the suggestions on this page, you can narrow down your research question by getting a better understanding of the literature in your field and what gaps exist in the research.
Here are some ways to do that:
A good literature review begins with a good research question. What makes a good research question? Something answerable by more than a yes or no answer. For example, climate change is an okay topic to begin with, but what about it? Ask yourself the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions about your topic. Climate change might become how is coastal erosion caused by climate change affecting communities on the coast of Southeast Louisiana? The more narrow your topic is, the easier it will be to limit your search.
Once you've selected a topic, you can refine it by either expanding or limiting your focus. You could limit your research to a particular time period (perhaps the past 10 years of research on the topic), the group studied (looking at only a particular population). You could expand your research by adding additional concepts (in our example, maybe looking at the effects of both coastal erosion and increased severe weather events) or removing limiters (like getting rid of a time period limit).
If you're finding that refining process challenging, do some background research. The research process is iterative, so every time you read another piece of information, your background knowledge grows and changes, and your research question may shift based on what you've read. We'll go over some ideas for developing background knowledge below.
You can find example review articles to serve as a model and introduce you to important pieces of research. You can find review articles in a few ways:
For those who are working on a literature review for a dissertation or thesis, it can be helpful to look at the literature reviews of others in your program at LSU or other institutions. Where you can find these depends on factors like the age and institution of the dissertation/thesis. You can find step-by-step instructions for how to search on the guide below.