## Finding a suitable topic

For a first orientation on your topic, you should start reading up on it. Useful sources for this are:

- Wikipedia (be critical of its reliability)

- Nexis Uni for news articles from newspapers and magazines

- Introductory textbooks

- Consulting experts

To determine whether a topic is suitable for a paper or thesis, you need to search in scholarly literature. This allows you to explore how a topic has been researched within the (social) sciences. Useful sources here are (online) reference works such as:

- Handbooks

- Encyclopedias

- Scholarly dictionaries

These reference works provide an overview of different perspectives and academic debates around a topic. They give you the key concepts and generally accepted knowledge in a particular field, definitions of technical terms, references to core literature, and descriptions of connections with other disciplines.

Use LibSearch to find reference works. How to search by topic in LibSearch will be explained later in this module.