In general, students are often seen frustrated about choosing a research topic for their assignments or research proposals. This happens with nursing students and nurses who are going back to school. When it comes to choosing research topics, the difficulty level is quite high and it’s because the field of healthcare covers a lot of marvelous issues.

So, how should you choose the right topic in nursing for assignments and research proposals?

Coming up with a topic:

Before coming up with an idea for the research proposal or assignment, nurses must understand that the primary purpose of this assignment is to carry out something that shows their understanding and to show that they are capable of doing so. Also, they should understand that their role is not to find the solution for world hunger. Therefore, it’s always good to pick a topic that has plenty of research behind it. In this line, nurses are advised to write down one or two specific topics of their interest. They must make sure that these topics are falling within their discipline.

From where can they get their topic ideas?

If they need some ideas, they can have a look at some of the major research clearinghouses. All of them would have articles ranked by the level of evidence, and almost all the hospitals would have subscriptions to any of these sites. So, if nurses don’t have access to these, they can check if the hospital where they do clinical work will let them access theirs.

So, what if they haven’t started working in the field yet? Perhaps, there should be a disease or condition that interests them. The inspiration can be from their family, personal experience, or friends. If she or he is interested in the risk factors or the prevention methods, the topics can be chosen from there. If the students don’t have any disease or condition of interest, then they can go for a particular health issue that interests them. They can take their time to think about which health issue drew them to enter the nursing profession in the first place. And, subsequently, the topic can be chosenlike this.

In any case, nurses are advised to avoid going for “cutting edge” issues because they will not have many literature studies yet. For example, in case of any disease, it’s better to look for treatment options rather than going for assessment methods.

Some more resources to look at:

By now, nurses would have gotten some kind of idea about their area of interest. To choose the topics, apart from looking at the above resources, one can also have a look at some of the recent news about the health issue of choice. It would be even better if they narrow down the search to their hometown or city. Then, they can browse some e-Journals or review some textbooks of other courses for topic ideas.

Nurses should also remember that there is always an option to combine their interests. In this line, one can take their topic idea to a particular race or ethnic group. Also, they can look at the topics related to socio-economic challenges or the health disparities that are faced by the country currently. Furthermore, there are some controversial topics to explore. For example, there are some topics like medical marijuana, narcotics, cloning, and much more that may be worth looking into.

Conduct a literature search:

So, from the above steps, one would have jotted down at least a few topics in their interest areas. Now, it’s time to fix onto one topic, which may be the most difficult step. For this, nurses are advised to carry out a simple literature in a database like “CINAHL” or “Proquest Health & Medical”. While doing so, they must look for the research that has been completed already. Then, they can start narrowing down by looking for a more specific topic with a lot of resources behind it.

Here, an important point to be remembered that the research topics are not set in rock. Thus, choosing nursing topics is not always a straightforward process. As the nurses begin to look for articles on their initial topics, their research ideas might evolve along a completely new path. They should accept it as they are just part of the research process.

Take-home tips:

An important piece of advice for all nurses who are in the process of choosing of their research topics would be that they must choose a topic that excites them, intrigues them, and interests them in some way or another. This criterion is critical for them to live with it for a long time until their project is complete. Another reason to go for a topic that interests them is that they would never know where it will take them. Some nurses will think that they will never go back to school again. But, one can’t say what future holds for them. So, to be on the safe side, they should always try to involve in the thing that interests them.