Yale University Library Research Guides: Physician Assistant Online Program: Brainstorming and refining capstone topics

About this page

This section will walk you through exercises to develop a research topic and get a sense of the availability of literature on that topic. If you prefer to watch a recording, these concepts were covered in the November 2022 librarian live session.

At this stage of your project, you are executing scoping searches.

Scoping searches help you:

get an idea of how much literature there is on a topic
find prominent authors and papers in the field
identify gaps in the current scholarly conversation
refine your research question

This is in contrast to comprehensive or systematic searching, which you will conduct once your topic is finalized.

Brainstorming exercise

Mind mapping exercise
This tool from the University of Arizona Libraries will allow you to take an initial nugget of an idea and brainstorm potential directions you could explore for a capstone project. It will also help you develop some search terms to take into the various databases.

From term list to search strategy

Join synonyms together with ORs and major concepts together with ANDs. If you have three main ideas in your research topic, a search strategy could look like this: (concept A or A synonym or A acronym) AND (concept B or B synonym or B acronym) AND (concept C). It's important to include a variety of terms since authors refer to similar ideas by different names - you don't want to miss the perfect paper because somebody called it CBT and you wrote out "cognitive behavioral therapy"!

Example: (cannabinoid OR cannabis) AND (epilepsy OR seizure)
Example: (THC OR tetrahydrocannabinol) AND (CBD or cannabidiol) AND (epilepsy OR seizure)

Scoping searches in two databases

No one database holds the entirety of the biomedical literature. While PubMed is a great tool, it only holds about 5,000 journals. Meanwhile, Scopus has ~30k across a range of disciplines. The size of both tools have different affordances: PubMed's limited scope means each article is tagged with subject headings, study design, population characteristics, and more that make finding extremely relevant papers possible quickly; meanwhile, Scopus's broad content facilitates tracking citations, allowing you to track the development of the scholarly conversation of a topic over time.

PubMed
1. Paste your multi-concept search into the bar on the home page.
2. Using the lefthand sidebar, try looking at the publication trends over time on your topic, filter by study design (RCT for example), or filter for specific age groups.
3. Make note of relevant or interesting-looking papers. Open them in new tabs, or paste citation information and links into a Word document.
4. Try different combinations of filters and collect additional search terms from the titles, abstracts, and keywords section of relevant articles.
Scopus
1. Paste each concept into its own row on the Scopus home page, adding additional rows using the + button. Combine rows with AND.
2. Sort your results by most recent to see where the conversation on the topic currently stands; by highly cited to acquaint yourself with talked-about papers (sometimes seminal and important, sometimes controversial - citations ≠ quality); and by relevance for a Google-like search experience.
3. Look at the lefthand sidebar and see frequent authors on the topic and journals that publish in the space.
4. On papers that sound relevant, browse through their bibliographies and see who has cited them since they were published.
5. Add additional search concepts if you want fewer results, remove search concepts if you want more results.
6. Note interesting papers throughout!
7. Repeat.

Refine and reflect

Work through these questions to refine your research topic and reflect on your work:

How did your initial topic change over the course of brainstorming search terms and conducting scoping searches?
What is your topic of interest now?
How many relevant papers did you find today? How many are clinical trials, compared to opinion pieces or conference presentations?
Is there still an active conversation around your topic in the literature? Or did publishing drop off 5+ years ago?
Does your topic seem like a viable capstone topic?
If not, how could you broaden the scope to find good evidence, or narrow the scope to make results sets more manageable?

Testing the viability of your topic worksheet

Capstone topic development exercises
This worksheet is another version of the exercises above, with places to type your findings.

Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library