a lit review in terms of what it does, what it is, what the purpose is and so forth. And

that’s kind of general information. But then I have a strategy that I think will be

pretty practical I hope and show you well yeah I know what it is and I know what I’m

supposed to do, but how do I do it?

And then how when I get all of these sources how to I organize them? And then how do I

actually write the darn thing? Because I think that where a lot of the information is missing.

Your professors can just say do this, do this, do this, in very general terms, but I hopefully

will get down into the dirt of it, get our hands dirty, and actually say well how do

I, what verbs do I use? How do I put these two sources together? Okay? I’m going to

tell you that I really didn’t make up any of this on my own; I’d love to take full

credit for it but actually what I did was I did two things. There is a wonderful book

called They Say, I Say: the Moves of Matter in Academic Writing, and it talks about how

to use source material in your writing. It’s actually directed at undergraduates, but I

think it’s so helpful and so practical that it’s a book, it’s like about that thin,

it’s not big, and it’s not little print or anything like, but it even gives you a

list of verbs that may be helpful in terms of saying okay scholar x says, and we’re

going to go through some of these in the presentation as well.

Then I found that a lot of times the examples that they give in this book are not helpful

to graduate students because they’re not in-depth enough, and also I had a hard time

finding examples as well, so I found a literature review that’s in economics, which is not

my field. Which I found it would be really better to pick a lit review that wasn’t

in my field at all and show you how it could work in any field. Okay? So what I did was

I took almost all the examples from this article, “Sociologic Economic Conditions of Poverty

Crime.” So those, what I’ve done is taken this stuff and this stuff and just put it

together. Okay?

Well let’s just cover the basics just to get started with the lit review. Well, and

that’s a good question because you may be doing a couple of different lit reviews. There

are actually two kinds of lit reviews, but basically it’s a comprehensive examination

of all of the research and all of the literature done on a particular topic; that’s obvious,

you guys probably already know that. Okay? But there are two categories of literature

reviews, and I want to break it down because I’m really going to focus more on one category

over the other. There are two categories; one is a literature review that contextualizes

a research study, and for probably 90% of you, and I’m spit-balling this statistic

here, but for about 90% of you, that’s what you’re doing. You’re doing a study; you’re

doing a research study, okay, in your dissertation your thesis, whatever. Okay? Or your professor

is doing a study, you know, empirical research or whatever. You are then doing the literature

review that justifies the study, correct? Okay? If it’s a journal article, and you’re

doing the research, if it’s a dissertation, if it’s a thesis, that’s what you’re

doing. There is one other kind of literature review though, and I think it’s just important

to like just touch on it and that is a literature review that is a study in and of itself. Okay?

You can actually publish a journal article that is in and of itself a literature review.

Alright? So for example if there is a topic that is very mature, and there is a lot of

literature written on it, and it would advance knowledge in the field to do a literature

review on it that would be helpful. There’s also a literature review where it’s a new

or emerging topic and it would be helpful to gather all of the literature on this new

or emerging topic; that’s suitable as well. The other part that is like helpful too, I’ve

seen some literature reviews that combine, if there’s a topic that’s interdisciplinary

and nobody has looked at the interdisciplinary part of it, they bring in multiple disciplines

on the literature review and advance the knowledge that way. That second one is not really what

we’re going to talk about today, but the concepts will apply. But most of you are guys

are in the boat where you have to write a lit review for your dissertation or thesis

or a journal article, okay? All right let’s move on to the next step. What’s the reason?

Why would you write a literature review? Well my professor told me it was part of my dissertation;

it’s a chapter in my dissertation. Well what is it for? One, it establishes what is

already known about a particular topic, and two what methods have been used to research

that topic. Okay? And then also, when you’re doing your research, if you don’t do a literature

review first, how do you know you’re not duplicating what somebody else has already

done? That’s bad because then you go to your chair and you go, ‘Here it is, this

is the last six months of my life’s work,’ and they go, ‘Yeah, but Smith did that three

years ago. Smith and Wesson did a study that’s very similar to yours, and you know, and start

over, right? So you don’t want to get in that bind, you want to do your literature

review. It’s a matter of front end loading versus back end loading your work; you want

to front to end load your work; you don’ t want to reproduce what somebody else has

done, unless you are reproducing a study that somebody else has done. A lot of times you

use the same and methodology and you get different results. In the sciences I think this is done,

but you still don’t want exactly the same thing to happen because then you’re just

replicating, okay? It also exposes gaps in literature and helps you position your research.

In your dissertation or your thesis you’re supposed to come up with something new, right?

Okay? Well how do you know what’s new? How do you know what’s new? One of the last

slides I’m going to show you is then how to find the gaps in the research because I

think that’s a little difficult. I’ve done several literature reviews, and these

are the questions I ask myself. And these are the questions that people ask me. I think

the big question is how much literature do I need to look at? I could spend probably

the next five years of my life looking at the literature in this field and that’s

depressing, you know? So how much, what related ideas do I need to explore, subtopics or overarching

ideas? A lot of times you’re looking at a topic, but that topic has subtopics, correct?

Or that subtopic has overarching topics. How do I know, okay, how do I know that I need

to go to related ideas? Well you just need to start swimming in the literature and figure

it out. Let me give you an example from my latest lit review. So I’m looking at plagiarism,

okay, you know, just the concept of plagiarism, but what I really started with was academic

dishonesty. And I realized that that was too big a topic, and I got myself in the literature,

and I got myself in a real tangle because there was so much literature on it and I go,

‘How am I going to right about everything? I can’t.’ Okay, is there a bigger topic

that I need to look at, or is there a subtopic that I need to look at? And one of the things

we were talking about before this started was the idea that you’re trying to decide

on your dissertation topic, and then you need to do your literature review; you may swap

that; you may go ahead and start the literature review, and then expose a gap in the literature

and find your dissertation topic. This is what happened to me and it was really helpful.

Is there certain literature that provides a better couch for your study than others?

And that’s how you can also discriminate whether you’re going to use a piece of literature

in your literature review. And a related question that may be a duplicate question, but more

practical for you is, why use a particular instrument for my study, or why use a particular

methodology for my study? Okay? In the hard sciences if you’re looking at laminitis,

which is really a fascinating to me. If you’re looking at laminitis, scientists have been

looking at this for a long time. Have they been looking in a different way at the problem

then you’re looking at it. He’s using a new method or approach so why use a different

method? Because the other methods haven’t worked. See what I’m saying? You only know

that when you look at the literature though. What’s been done before to tackle my particular

research topic or problem? And the next step is finding the literature, that would be good,

you know. Some of you have found too much literature, and we’ll deal with that in

a few slides. But finding literature, how do you know you can find. One of the things

that I think, and I’m going to show you the details for everyone of these suggestion,

but one of the things I think is sorely underutilized is your subject specialist reference librarian.

When I talked to the reference librarian and the subject librarians they go, ‘We just

want people to come see us, we love to work with people!’ So they’re like waiting

for you, their arms outstretched; let me help you. Okay so take advantage of that, it’s

free. The other thing that I think is helpful is how do you find then also then good sources?

I swim through those databases, the library databases, and I’m completely overwhelmed.

How many of you guys find that to be true? I look in there and I do like a search, a

topical search; and I get 18,000 hits, and I go through and I go well how do I even know

that this is a good source? How do I even know that this is something that will be helpful

to me because one of the things in your literature review is you the question asks how much literature

do I need to look at?

You’re not going to be able to look at all of the literature if you have a big topic,

correct? So how do you know who are the scholars that you really need to cite? And really you

want the big players; you don’t need to mess with the little guys; you want the big

scholars, the big players in your field, correct? I don’t’ know about you guys but when

I first research a topic who the big players are, do you? I don’t know who the big players

are. Ah, but Google does. If you go to scholar.google.com it is not comprehensive. Your databases, your

library databases are a lot more comprehensive than this, but as a starting point, these

articles come up, these books come up. And right here it says cited by and there’s

a number; this says citied by 45, so that’s 45 other scholarly sources cited that source.

So if your overwhelmed with the amount of literature you’re looking at, you only want

to find the big players in the field right? So if it says cited by two, which that would

be my journal article, you may not want to use it. But if it says by cited by 60, cited

by 200, right? Then you go “ahhhh,” maybe this person is somebody that people are talking

to and talking about. And all your doing is your tapping in to the conversation and your

trying to find a place for you to join the conversation, you’re trying to find a little

hole for you to fit into. Alright? This is a real quick and dirty way of finding the

sources very quickly. Once your very familiar with the big name players in your field, the

people that are talking the most, the most respected, the most controversial, whatever,

whatever your actually looking for, then go back to the library datatbase, then you can

do your searches, your searches then can be much more refined because maybe you just want

to find all the articles from Donald Mckay because he’s the biggest player in academic

dishonesty research that you can find. Then your going to find related articles to that

article, see how it all kinds of webs together? You can find dissertations written on your

topic from your department from Texas A&M just like that. Okay. Why is this helpful?

I wanted to find out, I wanted to read dissertations supervised by my chair and other members of

my committee. Now that’s a little bit outside of the literature review but you understand

why I might want to do that? I want to know what they’re going to be looking for, what’

they’ve signed off on, that kind of thing. I also want to know what a dissertation in

my department looks like, okay? Now, there are all kinds of methodologies you may be

using you may find you may go ahead and look for a dissertation or a thesis with even the

methodology and so forth, there’s a lot of things. But at the very minimum, to bring

it back to the topic were talking about today you could look at a dissertation from you’re

department and your field and look at the literature review and see what It looks like.

Particularly those where your chair or your committee members have supervised those other

students. See what it looks like, see what your committee members are going to expect

because lets be honest you guys you know your committee members sign the paperwork, correct?

Right? They do. And, and, and you want to be in line with there expectations okay?

Alright. So what you do here is you just go to the library, just the home page you pick

up the database one, it says search for databases, and it says proquest dissertation so you can

look for school: Texas A&M University. You can look for the terms in the abstract or

you can actually look for the terms used in the document text, so your topic end, did

anybody at Texas A&M in my department or whatever at Texas A&M, write a dissertation with this

topic used in the text? I think that this is astronomically helpful and a lot of people

don’t know about it. And it’s a way to do your homework before you do your homework.

Aright where are we now? We know we have to do a lit review, we have gone to the library

databases, looked at the subject librarians. We actually have stacks and stacks and stacks

of printed pdf files in our house in our car in the back seat. How do you wade through

all of that stuff especially if you have a lot of it? Okay so the deal is you want to

find out what scholars are saying about your topic, and we already know how to find the

good ones, the big players, Google Scholar. What are the ongoing debates or conversations

on your topic? Okay? Is anybody talking about your topic at all? Okay and if they aren’t

why? And that’s something to think about in terms of making choices, and if people

are talking, whose talking and what are they talking about? This also helps you organize

your information you have a copious amount of information when you’re doing your literature

review. You have lots of information and Brandy and I were talking about this earlier, that

we gathered all the information then we took a break from the literature review and when

we went back we had no idea where to start again because we had forgotten everything

that was in every article. We didn’t really forget, but we kind of did because you almost

have to be concentrating on that topic intently. You have to be thinking about it and thinking

about it and you go okay what does so and so say and what does so and so say and what

does so and so say okay? So what are the ongoing debates within your topic and it may be if

your in the hard sciences it may be about methodology, why does this methodology work

better than this methodology? Well this study was done but it didn’t do any good, and

if your in education there’s a lot of theories in education, education, they love theories

well the theory is this, well this theory may not be adequate, does this theory work?