It is not difficult to narrow your topic especially if you have many sources for a particular topic. Think about what are some issues that you enjoy learning about. Is there a particular perspective you can take? Are there sources from which you can study that topic from that particular perspective? Go to the library, study your topic beginning with a more general book and then go to more specialized ones; talk to the subject librarian about sources, meet with the professor, and follow the leads suggested by all of them. The most successful papers are usually those whose focus was well established early in the semester.

1. Take a comparative approach. See if you can expand your topic by comparing it to a similar one in another place or time. Comparative approaches are usually very interesting and can reveal a lot about a topic, but they need to be carefully crafted. You need to make sure that you have used good logic in finding a strong common denominator for the comparisons that you want to make.
2. If there are secondary sources (books written about a particular issue or event), see if these include primary sources or excerpts coming from primary sources (documents closer to the event/issue that is being studied) within them that you can interpret in a different light. You may be able to use those in your paper.
3. You need to assess the viability of your paper topic during the first weeks of the semester. If after much consultation and research you arrive at a dead end, this may be a signal that you need to change your topic.

That is usually fine, but do it early in the semester. Most professors would rather have you change your topic than seeing you still struggling with the search for sources by the middle of the semester. So the advice is that you do it early and in consultation with the instructor.

Once you have a topic that is narrow enough and particular sources to do that research you need to think about what specific issue/question/controversy or problem of study will guide your inquiry.

Historians should not get lost in the mere recompilation of names, dates, numbers, and policies, but instead should formulate a problem that will give sense and structure to the facts and information. Having a question/controversy/problem of study helps researchers to stay focused.

Examples:

This is one of the most critical and difficult parts of doing research because you may know that your topic involves a problem or controversy and still have trouble identifying it. Here are some possible strategies:

• Write down on a paper all of the questions that interest you and that come to mind as you read the secondary and primary sources. Then, try to group those that are similar. For each group of similar questions, eliminate those that are repetitive and re-write others so that you can come up with one or two questions that can't be combined.
• Read historiographical essays (essays that critically evaluate the works that have been written about a particular subject) about the topic that you are interested. These essays usually signal areas needed for further research. Give priority to essays that have been written fairly recently yet do not disregard old ones; they may provide some ideas, too. See also: How do I find sources for my paper?
• Bring those questions to the professor and discuss them with him/her.

  Historians transform topics into questions/controversies/problems of study and seek out “solutions” that will be expressed in tentative answers, as hypotheses.

• According to the Longman Dictionary of English , a hypothesis is “an idea which is suggested as a possible way of explaining facts, providing an argument, etc.”
• Therefore, once you have your question or problem, you have to think, based on your sources, “what is the possible answer/solution to that problem?” How can you explain the solution to your problem of study with your available sources? Why?
• With these questions, ideas, and possible hypotheses in mind, you can go to do your research. It is very important to have these questions and hypotheses clear because they will help to keep you focused. It may not be a bad idea to keep them with you on a piece of paper in front of you as you do your research.
• Of course, you may find while doing research that you need to refine those questions and hypotheses, and this is just fine. You may find yourself doing this quite often. Do not fall in despair; this may just mean that your ideas are maturing, and evolving.

Examples:

Once you have identified what specifically you are researching on you can immerse yourself in the research.