What do you want to know?  You must first ask a question in order to discover or develop any idea.  Starting with a good question gives you an advantage in research and writing.

A very common research problem is beginning with the answer before asking the question.  A research question is not the same as a thesis statement - a research question is an open-ended beginning, not an endpoint.

Examples of good research questions include:

• Should cell phone use while driving be banned?
• How does the media affect the body image and wellness of teenagers?
• Should the use of marijuana for medical purposes be legalized?
• What influence did the Greeks have on the development of mathematics?

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Once you have formulated a good research question/topic, you will need to pick out the words and phrases that are most important to your search. This is called identifying the main concepts and is necessary for searching databases.

For example, let's say your research question is:

What influence did the Greeks have on the development of modern architecture?

Looking at the question word-by-word, let's see which words will actually be useful when you search for information:

What influence did the Greeks have on the development of modern architecture?

The useful words/concepts are in red. Notice the words chosen have some integral meaning - and they each describe a specific part of our question. We skipped words that were too common or generic (what, on, the, did, etc.)

A search statement is a combination of words or concepts that you will use in a database to retrieve appropriate articles. When creating a search statement, you should try to use one word to describe each part of your question.

For example, using the concepts in our research question, a search statement may look like this:

Greeks AND development AND modern AND architecture