Narrow the Topic Until You Can Finish

Write your topic down, then answer four questions honestly. Does it connect to what you already know? Can you physically reach the sources, and will you be allowed to use them? Can you understand them, in their language and at their level? Do you know, or can you learn in time, the method it needs? A “no” to any of these is a reason to narrow or shift the topic now, before you’ve invested months. Eco said he wouldn’t take on a topic unless he knew where the sources were, whether they were easy to get to, and whether he could fully understand them.

The Craft of Research, by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb and Joseph Williams, offers a quick test: if your topic is only a few words long, it’s probably too broad. Narrow it by adding an action or a relationship. Their example turns “the history of commercial aviation” into the military’s role in developing one airliner, the DC-3, in the early years of commercial flight. The longer version tells you what to look for and what to leave out.

Most topics can be cut in a few standard directions. Try each and keep the cuts that make the sources easier to handle:

• Time: a decade, a year, a season, one event.
• Place: one country, one city, one institution, one archive.
• Group: one population, profession, author or organization.
• Source type: newspapers, court records, letters, survey data, one author’s published works.
• Angle: one aspect of the topic, such as its economics, its law or how it was reported.

Eco’s own examples work this way. A study of the “world turned upside down” theme (fish that fly, birds that swim) across all medieval writers would mean reading every writer who ever used it, however obscure. He suggests narrowing it to the Carolingian poets: one group, one period.

If your topic is an abstract problem (freedom, justice, the nature of the mind), Eco’s advice is to anchor it in someone who has already worked on it. Instead of “the notion of freedom,” write about the notion of freedom in Kant. You still get to think about freedom, but with a foothold in existing scholarship and a body of texts you can actually finish reading. Your own ideas can go in the last chapter.

Library catalogs have already divided most subjects. Look up your topic in the Library of Congress Subject Headings at id.loc.gov and you’ll see narrower headings beneath it, other names for the same subject (useful search terms), and headings that combine the subject with a place or an aspect. Each narrower heading is a topic someone has found big enough to write a book about.

Eco gave his students a range: no longer than three years, no less than six months. For a six-month project he set three conditions: the topic is clearly defined, it is either recent or little written about (so the existing literature is small), and the sources are available locally. Shrink those numbers for a term paper. If you can’t list the sources you’ll read and roughly how long each will take, the topic isn’t narrow enough yet.