Universal Access
If you're fishing for a topic, often a good place to start is current controversies. If your reaction to a statement is "How could someone say something like that?", run with it -- not to refute it but to discover and explain whatever evidence and reasoning might lead a reasonable person of good will to say "something like that" is true or right in some respect or under some circumstances, which your research and analysis will test.
The "In context" family of databases from Gale lay out pro-cons of controversies with articles and data from scholarly journals and popular sources. Use them to refine and focus your own thinking; use their references to find trustworthy scholarship, data, and primary sources; and especially to harvest on-target search terms to use in subject-oriented databases like Worldwide Political Science Abstracts or HeinOnline. These can be especially useful for political and political science/international studies research:
You risk violating the Honor Code if you rely only on the "canned" sources in these databases for assignments that expect you to do your own research design, searching, and analyses. Check with your instructor.
Often predefined topics won't keep up with events. Peer-reviewed scholarship can take two years and more to appear after an event. Journalism may be your best available source of information. News sources might identify experts in universities, government, think tanks, or industry who have published research about similar events or problems that you can apply.
If data have been published, there is research behind them. Reputable data collections will provide source information: who or what agency collected and analyzed the data, when. Data citations will often include titles of publications that can connect you to datasets collected over time and/or across related questions in one place or period. These data collections are good starters:
