Unless you've been specifically asked to write a report on recent trends in water rights legislation, or your teacher's instructed you to deconstruct a Wordsworthian dream - selecting a topic is the first (and most important) part of the research writing process. If you're not quite sure how to go about selecting a good topic, here's some advice.

Start with a general area that interests you, and browse through some of the articles and books you found in the last step that have been written recently on different aspects of that topic. Think about what you want to write about.

You may want to begin including source works you've identified as interesting or related to your area of interest in your bibliographic database during this phase.

After you've spent some time browsing through existing materials, you need to start thinking about narrowing your interest down to a specific topic you can handle, being careful, of course, to make certain the scope of the topic is aligned with the paper requirements (a 3 page essay on the contributions of black women to the suffrage movement, for instance, probably won't work, as it's too broad).

A word of caution as you are selecting a topic: you want to find a topic that will engage your energies -- something that you are genuinely interested in -- and not simply an area that you think will impress your instructor. On the other hand, it is probably wise to stay away from topics that are close to your deepest held beliefs . . . a surfeit of interest tends to tilt you away from coherent, logically developed discussions.