© Copyright 2000 State University of New York & Ulster County Community CollegeWhen you are examining a topic, you may approach it from many different angles or disciplines. If you were going to pursue some aspect of the Holocaust, from which discipline would you begin? The Disciplines
Knowledge is often divided among three major classifications called Disciplines:
Click on Humanities to see which subjects fall under this discipline.Click on Social Sciences to see which subjects are found in this discipline.
Click on Sciences to see what subjects are included in this discipline.
When you take a look at the topic of the Holocaust, from which discipline will you seek information? In reality, you might choose a topic which fits any one of the disciplines.One could explore the lost art treasures which the Nazis stole by searching the Humanities; you could examine the psychological aspects of persecution and mob behavior by searching the Social Sciences, or you could delve into medical literature (the discipline of Science) to explore the medical experiments done during WW II. Some topics, then, can be analyzed from many points of view, where others fall nicely into one of the disciplines.
Since you are a psych major, you decide to focus your research on the psychological aspects of the Holocaust. You wonder how people survive such attrocities and go on to have families. How will the experience of the Holocaust survivors impact their children? This idea intrigues you. You have narrowed your topic from World War II to Holocaust to survivors to impact of the Holocaust on survivors and their children.
So what exactly do you want to explore for the history paper? You decide your question will be:
What are the effects of the Holocaust on survivors and subsequent generations?
Click to see other examples on how to narrow your topic
Now that you have narrowed your topic and formulated your query, how will you begin to search the literature for your topic? Let's talk about search strategy.
