Keys to success in determining the nature and extent of the information needed are:
Formulate a research question
When formulating a research question, you need to consider what you already know about a topic, what questions you have about it, and what has been written on the topic. You need to be careful not to choose something that is so broad that you would be writing a book to answer your research question. On the other hand, you don't want to choose something that can be easily answered by reading one encyclopedia article.
Reading the texts for a course is a good place to start for generating research questions. Resources in the reference collection also can help in providing overviews of topics, controversies, and areas of scholarly research. For this course, try these encyclopedias:
Identify the types of resources you need.
A few questions to consider:
Determine the availability of information.
A few questions to consider: