 Hey, I'm Jeannie and I'm Keyon. All research projects and academic searches start somewhere. Your particular starting point may be determined by a number of things, such as your knowledge from prior research, the specific objectives of your research assignment, or even your own personal experience and feelings concerning the topic at hand. If you do just one search in one database, you'll only find a set of results that represent a narrow approach to your topic. By identifying what is missing from your research, you will be able to expand your results to include articles from other disciplines, different types or formats of resources, perspectives from outside academia, or unexpected novel approaches to your topics that your search might be missing. Actively expanding the scope of your perspectives will help you refine your research question so that you end up with a more holistic view of your topic in question. First, consider your current search. Based on your research question and hypothesis, you have likely selected a few keywords and made several searches. Take a moment to reflect on how and why you've constructed your research question as it is. Are you using academic language or more colloquial language? With what disciplinary or theoretical lens are you approaching your topic? What prior knowledge or personal experience do you have related to this topic? Reflecting upon these questions and arming yourself with a strong awareness of your starting perspective, you're now ready to expand. One way to expand your perspective is to begin by asking yourself, what am I missing? Just within your discipline, there are so many different ways to approach a question. You may get started by searching for opposite or alternate search terms. You can continue to expand your scope of research by including even more perspectives within your search. Although you may not be able to include all of these perspectives in your work, try to think of several varying perspectives that might be valuable in informing and narrowing your research question. In your search for sources, you might consider including articles and evidence from other disciplines beyond your own. For instance, if you're writing within an anthropological framework, you could expand your search to include research from medical, psychological, or sociological frameworks too. Different academic disciplines have their own process, which means that they may also have unique methods for collecting, reporting, and synthesizing their findings. Looking across disciplines may help you to discover evidence that either crucially supports or contradicts your own hypothesis, as well as offers you new angles that you may not have otherwise considered. Understanding where your research question sits in the broader scope of popular discourse can help situate your research and provide context to your reader. Although you may not be able to use sources from outside academia in the same way you're able to use academic sources, they may help you to frame your research within the context of the real world in a way that you would otherwise miss if you only looked at academic sources. Importantly, popular sources like news outlets or magazines sometimes provide citations to important academic research, which you can explore and analyze on your own. In most databases, you have the flexibility to filter and refine your results by document type. This can help you if you're specifically looking for research articles or a literature review. It might also be worth taking a second to expand those filters to see if there are any valuable books, dissertations or primary sources which might provide you with different perspectives beyond what you have already found. You will need to make important decisions about what to include and exclude from your research. However, the process of engaging in expansive research will give you a stronger understanding of where your argument fits in the larger picture, helping you to form, evaluate and support your research question thoroughly. Good luck.