 Welcome to the Finding Your Topic Tutorial. In this video, you will learn how to strategically take a broad research topic and narrow it down into something more manageable. Let's work through an example together. Say your professor asks you to write an essay on wellness and cite some credible sources. While that may seem simple, first we need to ask ourselves some important questions. Are there different types of wellness? What about wellness interests me? What area of wellness can I focus on for my assignment? Answering these questions will help focus your research topic. This initial step is called preemptive research or pre-search. This is the phase of a research project where you find out more information like related terms and concepts. The most common pre-search tool is Google. Googling wellness gets us billion results, which is overwhelming and not very helpful. However, when we scroll through the results, we might see some subtopics that are interesting to us. Starting at the Wikipedia page dedicated to the topic we are researching is a helpful tool to identify different keywords, people, events, or concepts. As you can see, wellness is too general a concept to have just one particular Wikipedia page. Just because a topic is broader than you originally thought does not mean it isn't worth pursuing. In fact, there will be more subtopics to choose from that are relevant to you and to your interests. One of the most important parts about researching a topic is that it needs to be something of interest to you. Let's think about the concept of wellness for a moment. What makes up wellness and how does it relate to you? Let's narrow our topic to wellness and college students. Ohio University's website has a page dedicated to wellness for students, which includes a variety of subtopics like physical health, mental health, and creating community. Clicking around this website, we will soon come up with several more specific aspects of wellness, such as emotional health, self-care, exercise, nutrition, or sleep. So we have sleep and college students, but we need something else. When college students get enough sleep, it may help their grades. Seems logical, right? So we have narrowed our topic to, What impact does sleep have on academic performance in college students? Now we have a topic that is interesting to us and much more manageable. In the next videos, you will learn how to apply what we learned from pre-searching wellness to library resources. This concludes the Finding Your Topic tutorial.