Topic Research Guide

The Resolution for the 2024-2025 season is:

Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.

Resolutions are chosen by a vote of representatives of every state via the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) and delegates from the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA), the National Catholic Forensics League (NCFL), the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL), and the National Debate Coaches Association (NDCA) and announced every January for the following fall semester.

The Washington Urban Debate League votes for both Washington D.C. and Maryland.

Research Guide

We're in an unprecedented information age, with information about anything at the click of a button, and historic misinformation campaigns by politicians and governments across the world. How can you sort through it all, find what you need, and avoid misinformation?

Research Tips

Accordion Content

A “Think Tank” is a collection of scholars who write and research to inform public policy making. There are a number of “full service” think tanks that try to cover most issue areas: 

There are also a number of think tanks that specialize in a specific area of policy: 

Security and Foreign Policy:

Domestic Policy:

While every author brings their own perspective to their writing, these sources are seen as reliable, fact oriented publications. To learn more about media bias, check out this chart. 

Wikipedia can be useful for background information. You can reference it in a debate IF you go to the links at the bottom of the page to find articles used to create the entry–use their citations as your own.

Sign up for the Brookings Briefing, Politico or RealClear’s topic reports, updates from major publications like the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, etc. and other newsletters and news aggregates. These are great ways to keep up to date on what is going on in this year’s topic area.

Create google alerts for key terms, bringing research to your inbox daily or weekly.
If you are looking for more in-depth research, especially for solvency mechanisms, case ideas and kritiks, Use googlescholar.com to find scholarly resources from journals, official publications, etc.

Similar to Google Scholar, Project Muse a great way to search for journal articles from more studious sources. The Boston Review is a free journal and book review that almost constantly publishes articles on critical subjects, protest, pedagogy, and other framing questions. Both are good sources of literature for Kritiks. 

Sci Hub is a hub of peer reviewed papers that is a great place to look for articles that you find behind paywalls elsewhere

Use this tool to look for academic research that cite one another and are about similar subjects.

Create a google doc where you can “dump” links you think might be useful later under relevant topics. Share the doc with your team and sort what you need and don’t need. 

The Congressional Research Service is Congress’s information request service, and creates great briefs on a range of topics. They are also mandated to produce a research guide on the policy debate topic every year, a great starting point for any debater.