Occupational Therapy

It can be really difficult to know whether or not you should 'call it quits' on searching for resources on your topic. To help you decide whether to continue searching, try answering the following questions:

1. Are you coming across the same information in multiple, credible sources (i.e. three or more)?
2. Have you already found relevant information in different types of sources (i.e. books, journal articles, government publications, newspaper articles – whatever is appropriate for your subject area)?
3. If you added a new angle or subtopic now, would it just complicate your argument rather than strengthening it?
4. Are you starting to collect information that isn’t exactly on your topic?
5. Are you running out of time to actually write/prepare your assignment?
6. Do you have enough information to cover the main points of your topic well (or support your thesis, if applicable)?

If you find yourself answering “yes” to most of these questions (where applicable), it’s probably time to move on.  I promise, you will never find all of the relevant information on your topic (unless you feel inspired to do your PhD on your current essay topic!).  It’s extremely tempting to want to keep looking, to make sure you’ve done the “best” job.  But giving into this temptation can result in having a huge pile of resources, little time to do anything with them, and a whole lot of stress.  Efficient researching often comes down to trusting ourselves, which obviously takes practice.  Hopefully the questions above will help a little in this process.