Information and Library Services

Getting Started with Your Research in Information Assurance

Developing and Refining Your Topic

Working with Your Topic

Doing Research in Information Assurance

Developing and Refining Your Topic

Unless you have been assigned a particular topic for an assignment, the first step in creating a successful research product, is to develop a workable, refined, and specific research question. If you have a particular interest or unique knowledge base about an issue, and it is appropriate for your course or assignment, it is always ideal to develop a research question that is actually interesting and useful to you as a student or as a researcher in your field. Topics should reflect the nature of the assignment and the length, scope and breadth of the writing project and they should be refined and specific enough to be “successful” in an online environment.

The first step in crafting a successful research topic online is to identify a basic subject area of interest and then to determine how best to refine that topic. Most typically this is done by restating your topic in the form of a question to ensure that there is an actual goal in the research and also something searchable and measurable to write about in your paper or assignment.

In addition to thinking of your topic as a refined and searchable question, it is important to identify the main concepts or keywords associated with your topic and then to test your topic in a few print or online sources to see the type of results you are likely to encounter in your research project online. Identifying key terms and concepts also helps you to prepare alternative terms or related issues that might be worth pursuing to increase the success of your project. These terms will also help you frame your research within a larger concept in case you need to broaden or narrow your research for optimal results or further research.

Working with Your Topic

Once you have selected a general topic for your research, you will need to do a little work before you start searching for resources. Identify what you think will be the focus and scope of your research by asking yourself some questions.

For example, a broad topic is "information security in small businesses.” How can you narrow the topic to have a more specific focus and scope? Are you interested in exploring

Affordable security options for small businesses
Partnering with larger corporations
The greatest threats to cybersecurity
Information security training programs for non-technical employees

Thinking about your present interests can help you develop an effective research question. If you are having difficulty narrowing your topic, you might want to try a quick search in a database to get some ideas. Click on some titles and look through the abstracts and at the subject terms in the database. Click on a subject that interests you to try another search.

Here is an example of some subject terms used in the ProQuest® Computing database.

You can use the subject headings and results to narrow your topic enough to express it as a more specific and focused research question. Some examples of research questions are:

Which small business information security threats can be most easily addressed?
What are vendors doing to address the security needs of smaller businesses?
Is an enterprise security solution “overkill” for most small business needs?

Remember that this is a process, so you may need to adjust your research question as you explore your topic.

Searching Basics

Once you have developed a research question and selected a database, you are ready to search. Start by thinking about the key concepts of your research question. Let’s say that your research question is, “What are the best training methods for teaching employees about information assurance?” The main concepts in this question are:

training***information assurance

You can use these terms in a broad, initial search, using the AND Boolean operator to find results which contain both keywords. Here is an example of how you would enter this search in the ProQuest® Computing database:

Often a simple keyword search will retrieve enough articles for your research. In this case, only 7 articles were found. It may be necessary to broaden the search for a better set of results.
You can use a variety of search techniques to produce better results. One easy way to make a search broader is to think of synonyms with meanings that are similar to your initial search words or phrases. “Information assurance” may be too narrow a phrase, so list some possible alternative phrases that mean the same or similar thing:

information assurance
information security
computer security
network security

Results will vary from database to database and it is often useful to test your individual search topic in a variety of databases to see if it is a workable research topic online. A particular search may work well in one information source and poorly in another. In ProQuest® Computing, using “computer security” rather than “information assurance” in our search statement increases the number of results from 7 to 249:

It is important to be flexible with the terms of your research question. You may need to adjust your search statement depending on the size and relevancy of the results. In some cases you might want to think of the other side of the question as well as alternative terms and issues related to your topic.

In researching information security training you might construct a search statement using as few or as many of your terms as you would like to be searched all at once in the database:

1. Combine like terminology with the Boolean operator "OR" - for example, if you use:

information security OR information assurance

you will find records that use either term. You’ll get more than you would using either term alone.

2. Group similar terminology with parentheses, when needed. Some databases will give you more than one search box so you can group your terms on separate lines. Some databases use quotation marks in addition to or instead of parentheses.

(training OR education)

3. Add truncation or wild card characters, if necessary. For example, you could add a truncation symbol to the end of a term to replace any letter or letters which may come at the end of the word. Check the database help screen to see what truncation symbol to use. It is usually * or ?

train* would retrieve train, trainer, trainers, training, etc.

4. Add adjacency or proximity symbols to phrases if you want to find articles in which your search terms are close together in the text.

information w/2 security

would find articles where the word “information” is within 2 words of the word “security.”

5. Combine sets with the Boolean operator "AND"

(corporation OR company) AND (information assurance OR information security) AND training

Review Module 3 for a more comprehensive explanation of these terms.

6. Remember that many databases allow you to limit your search according to whether you want full-text articles, peer-reviewed and scholarly journals, and/or book reviews.

Doing Research in Information Assurance

A good place to begin your research on accounting and information technology is the Information Assurance and Information Technology and Technology Management guides in the Search by Subject section of the Articles & More page. In addition to suggested library databases, you will find some good Web sites, e-books, and print books.