Broaden or narrow a research statement or question based on research interest and resources found.
Your topic may be too broad:
Consider identifying a sub-topic within the broader one "gun control" such as "Does increased gun control policy lead to decreased gun related violence in Indiana?"
Your topic may be too narrow:
Consider taking a step back from a highly detailed aspect of the topic to consider broader terms: "people are using eHarmony to develop superficial, unfulfilling virtual relationships" to "people are using social media web sites to develop superficial and unfulfilling relationships."
Project requirements: these "rules" should be identified in your assignment sheet or described in your syllabus.
Source requirements: If you have a hefty number of sources required, you'll need to incorporate those sources in your draft, thus increasing the length.
What kind of research? Are you creating an argument based on evidence/sources? Are you asking an important research question? See Selecting a Research Topic for more help.
Length: Is there a length requirement? This can be influenced by the topic you choose. A very short project means you'll have limited space within which to concisely develop your idea and use supporting sources sparingly. A longer project requires a compelling topic to develop into a thesis that uses multiple supporting sources.
In preparation for discovering sources efficiently and effectively, distill your topic into keywords that research tools understand so that they will return a good number of relevant results.
1. Write a brief sentence describing your research topic idea as if you were explaining it to a friend.
2. In the next line down, fill in the blanks with the most important words from that statement.
3. As you continue to find sources, add keywords and synonyms to this list.