Haven't decided on a specific research topic or thesis statement yet? That's OK! CQ Researcher has a great "browsing" feature that can help you choose a topic for your research. Just click the "Browse Topics" button near the top of the CQ Researcher homepage to be taken to a list of broad subject areas that you can continually narrow down until you find a topic you like (see screenshot, below).
Hot Topics
The 10 most popular research topics in CQ Researcher are listed under "Hot Topics" on the right side of the homepage (see screenshot, right). Click any topic to be taken to its latest report, with links to related reports that were published previously. These Hot Topic reports are updated at least once a year.
Searching
Instead of finding your topic via the browsing, you can search for it directly by using the CQ Researcher search bar, located near the top of almost every page (pictured, right).
TIP: Put phrases in quotes. If you're ever searching for a phrase (more than one word), you may want to put quotation marks (" ") around your search terms. This will ensure that the database searches for those words together, in that exact order. For example, if you searched for "community college" without quotation marks, you would end up with results that contain the words "community" and "college" separately, not necessarily joined together in the phrase "community college."
For more detailed help on searching in CQ Researcher, visit their Search Tips Page.
Search Results
By default, CQ Researcher will automatically order your search results by Relevancy (the results it thinks are "best" for you will be at the top), but you may also want to sort your results by date, depending on your situation (controls for sorting by Newest or Oldest are located near the top-right of a Search Results Page, see screenshot below). You may also want to narrow your results by clicking on any of the Topics located in the grey box on the right-hand side of the screen.
To view the full-text of a Report, click on a Report's title (in black). More information on Reports can be found on the next page of this guide.
