Tips And Tricks For Composing Biology Topics For A Research Paper

If you have been assigned a biology research paper, you might need a little assistance choosing a topic. Biology instructors are usually excellent at teaching the content and instructing labs, but many of them could use help with writing assignments. Since most biology teachers are not writing instructors, their students are usually left to their own devices to decide on topics and craft their own research papers. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you develop a useful biology research paper topic:

Check the Textbook to Get Started

One of the best places to look for topics for any science research paper is the classroom textbook. The table of contents is the first place you should look. This part of the textbook is useful because it has already organized biology topics, so you can find something you are interested in learning more about so you can investigate narrowed ideas in the actual textbook. Some timely topics that often occur in biology textbooks are viruses, biological diversity, and ecosystems. These three topics alone should be able to stimulate your thinking so you can come up with subtopics that you could research for a paper.

Pick the Broad Topic and Start to Narrow

Let’s say you chose to look into topics about viruses. The next step would be to look at your textbook to see what ideas are included in the pages dedicated to viruses. Or, you could begin to look online. If you enter “research paper topics virus” into a search engine, you will get over three million hits. These will include topics about computer viruses, which will not be an appropriate topic for a biology paper. You will find sources like journals, newspapers, and educational pages. All of these will have ideas to narrow your virus topic. This is where you should begin to weed out topics that you are not interesting in researching. You might find information on animal viruses that are wreaking havoc on farms and the food industry. You might find topics about deadly viruses in Africa and you might find topics that you cannot pronounce. You should immediately remove any topic ideas that you do not understand.

Build a List, Then Begin to Cut

Each time you find a topic that sounds interesting, put it into a list. When you get between 10 and 20 topics, it is time to start narrowing these. Read through the list and cross out the ones that sound the least appealing. You should be left with just a few. Pick your favorite and get to work.