Subtitles section Play video
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We’re going to talk about a lot of the things that you probably have already read about
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a lit review in terms of what it does, what it is, what the purpose is and so forth. And
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that’s kind of general information. But then I have a strategy that I think will be
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pretty practical I hope and show you well yeah I know what it is and I know what I’m
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supposed to do, but how do I do it?
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And then how when I get all of these sources how to I organize them? And then how do I
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actually write the darn thing? Because I think that where a lot of the information is missing.
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Your professors can just say do this, do this, do this, in very general terms, but I hopefully
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will get down into the dirt of it, get our hands dirty, and actually say well how do
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I, what verbs do I use? How do I put these two sources together? Okay? I’m going to
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tell you that I really didn’t make up any of this on my own; I’d love to take full
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credit for it but actually what I did was I did two things. There is a wonderful book
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called They Say, I Say: the Moves of Matter in Academic Writing, and it talks about how
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to use source material in your writing. It’s actually directed at undergraduates, but I
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think it’s so helpful and so practical that it’s a book, it’s like about that thin,
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it’s not big, and it’s not little print or anything like, but it even gives you a
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list of verbs that may be helpful in terms of saying okay scholar x says, and we’re
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going to go through some of these in the presentation as well.
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Then I found that a lot of times the examples that they give in this book are not helpful
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to graduate students because they’re not in-depth enough, and also I had a hard time
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finding examples as well, so I found a literature review that’s in economics, which is not
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my field. Which I found it would be really better to pick a lit review that wasn’t
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in my field at all and show you how it could work in any field. Okay? So what I did was
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I took almost all the examples from this article, “Sociologic Economic Conditions of Poverty
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Crime.” So those, what I’ve done is taken this stuff and this stuff and just put it
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together. Okay?
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Well let’s just cover the basics just to get started with the lit review. Well, and
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that’s a good question because you may be doing a couple of different lit reviews. There
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are actually two kinds of lit reviews, but basically it’s a comprehensive examination
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of all of the research and all of the literature done on a particular topic; that’s obvious,
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you guys probably already know that. Okay? But there are two categories of literature
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reviews, and I want to break it down because I’m really going to focus more on one category
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over the other. There are two categories; one is a literature review that contextualizes
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a research study, and for probably 90% of you, and I’m spit-balling this statistic
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here, but for about 90% of you, that’s what you’re doing. You’re doing a study; you’re
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doing a research study, okay, in your dissertation your thesis, whatever. Okay? Or your professor
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is doing a study, you know, empirical research or whatever. You are then doing the literature
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review that justifies the study, correct? Okay? If it’s a journal article, and you’re
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doing the research, if it’s a dissertation, if it’s a thesis, that’s what you’re
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doing. There is one other kind of literature review though, and I think it’s just important
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to like just touch on it and that is a literature review that is a study in and of itself. Okay?
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You can actually publish a journal article that is in and of itself a literature review.
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Alright? So for example if there is a topic that is very mature, and there is a lot of
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literature written on it, and it would advance knowledge in the field to do a literature
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review on it that would be helpful. There’s also a literature review where it’s a new
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or emerging topic and it would be helpful to gather all of the literature on this new
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or emerging topic; that’s suitable as well. The other part that is like helpful too, I’ve
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seen some literature reviews that combine, if there’s a topic that’s interdisciplinary
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and nobody has looked at the interdisciplinary part of it, they bring in multiple disciplines
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on the literature review and advance the knowledge that way. That second one is not really what
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we’re going to talk about today, but the concepts will apply. But most of you are guys
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are in the boat where you have to write a lit review for your dissertation or thesis
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or a journal article, okay? All right let’s move on to the next step. What’s the reason?
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Why would you write a literature review? Well my professor told me it was part of my dissertation;
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it’s a chapter in my dissertation. Well what is it for? One, it establishes what is
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already known about a particular topic, and two what methods have been used to research
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that topic. Okay? And then also, when you’re doing your research, if you don’t do a literature
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review first, how do you know you’re not duplicating what somebody else has already
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done? That’s bad because then you go to your chair and you go, ‘Here it is, this
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is the last six months of my life’s work,’ and they go, ‘Yeah, but Smith did that three
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years ago. Smith and Wesson did a study that’s very similar to yours, and you know, and start
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over, right? So you don’t want to get in that bind, you want to do your literature
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review. It’s a matter of front end loading versus back end loading your work; you want
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to front to end load your work; you don’ t want to reproduce what somebody else has
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done, unless you are reproducing a study that somebody else has done. A lot of times you
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use the same and methodology and you get different results. In the sciences I think this is done,
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but you still don’t want exactly the same thing to happen because then you’re just
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replicating, okay? It also exposes gaps in literature and helps you position your research.
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In your dissertation or your thesis you’re supposed to come up with something new, right?
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Okay? Well how do you know what’s new? How do you know what’s new? One of the last
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slides I’m going to show you is then how to find the gaps in the research because I
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think that’s a little difficult. I’ve done several literature reviews, and these
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are the questions I ask myself. And these are the questions that people ask me. I think
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the big question is how much literature do I need to look at? I could spend probably
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the next five years of my life looking at the literature in this field and that’s
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depressing, you know? So how much, what related ideas do I need to explore, subtopics or overarching
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ideas? A lot of times you’re looking at a topic, but that topic has subtopics, correct?
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Or that subtopic has overarching topics. How do I know, okay, how do I know that I need
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to go to related ideas? Well you just need to start swimming in the literature and figure
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it out. Let me give you an example from my latest lit review. So I’m looking at plagiarism,
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okay, you know, just the concept of plagiarism, but what I really started with was academic
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dishonesty. And I realized that that was too big a topic, and I got myself in the literature,
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and I got myself in a real tangle because there was so much literature on it and I go,
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‘How am I going to right about everything? I can’t.’ Okay, is there a bigger topic
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that I need to look at, or is there a subtopic that I need to look at? And one of the things
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we were talking about before this started was the idea that you’re trying to decide
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on your dissertation topic, and then you need to do your literature review; you may swap
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that; you may go ahead and start the literature review, and then expose a gap in the literature
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and find your dissertation topic. This is what happened to me and it was really helpful.
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Is there certain literature that provides a better couch for your study than others?
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And that’s how you can also discriminate whether you’re going to use a piece of literature
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in your literature review. And a related question that may be a duplicate question, but more
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practical for you is, why use a particular instrument for my study, or why use a particular
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methodology for my study? Okay? In the hard sciences if you’re looking at laminitis,
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which is really a fascinating to me. If you’re looking at laminitis, scientists have been
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looking at this for a long time. Have they been looking in a different way at the problem
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then you’re looking at it. He’s using a new method or approach so why use a different
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method? Because the other methods haven’t worked. See what I’m saying? You only know
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that when you look at the literature though. What’s been done before to tackle my particular
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research topic or problem? And the next step is finding the literature, that would be good,
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you know. Some of you have found too much literature, and we’ll deal with that in
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a few slides. But finding literature, how do you know you can find. One of the things
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that I think, and I’m going to show you the details for everyone of these suggestion,
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but one of the things I think is sorely underutilized is your subject specialist reference librarian.
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When I talked to the reference librarian and the subject librarians they go, ‘We just
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want people to come see us, we love to work with people!’ So they’re like waiting
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for you, their arms outstretched; let me help you. Okay so take advantage of that, it’s
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free. The other thing that I think is helpful is how do you find then also then good sources?
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I swim through those databases, the library databases, and I’m completely overwhelmed.
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How many of you guys find that to be true? I look in there and I do like a search, a
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topical search; and I get 18,000 hits, and I go through and I go well how do I even know
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that this is a good source? How do I even know that this is something that will be helpful
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to me because one of the things in your literature review is you the question asks how much literature
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do I need to look at?
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You’re not going to be able to look at all of the literature if you have a big topic,
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correct? So how do you know who are the scholars that you really need to cite? And really you
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want the big players; you don’t need to mess with the little guys; you want the big
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scholars, the big players in your field, correct? I don’t’ know about you guys but when
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I first research a topic who the big players are, do you? I don’t know who the big players
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are. Ah, but Google does. If you go to scholar.google.com it is not comprehensive. Your databases, your
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library databases are a lot more comprehensive than this, but as a starting point, these
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articles come up, these books come up. And right here it says cited by and there’s
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a number; this says citied by 45, so that’s 45 other scholarly sources cited that source.
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So if your overwhelmed with the amount of literature you’re looking at, you only want
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to find the big players in the field right? So if it says cited by two, which that would
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be my journal article, you may not want to use it. But if it says by cited by 60, cited
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by 200, right? Then you go “ahhhh,” maybe this person is somebody that people are talking
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to and talking about. And all your doing is your tapping in to the conversation and your
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trying to find a place for you to join the conversation, you’re trying to find a little
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hole for you to fit into. Alright? This is a real quick and dirty way of finding the
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sources very quickly. Once your very familiar with the big name players in your field, the
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people that are talking the most, the most respected, the most controversial, whatever,
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whatever your actually looking for, then go back to the library datatbase, then you can
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do your searches, your searches then can be much more refined because maybe you just want
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to find all the articles from Donald Mckay because he’s the biggest player in academic
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dishonesty research that you can find. Then your going to find related articles to that
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article, see how it all kinds of webs together? You can find dissertations written on your
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topic from your department from Texas A&M just like that. Okay. Why is this helpful?
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I wanted to find out, I wanted to read dissertations supervised by my chair and other members of
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my committee. Now that’s a little bit outside of the literature review but you understand
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why I might want to do that? I want to know what they’re going to be looking for, what’
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they’ve signed off on, that kind of thing. I also want to know what a dissertation in
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my department looks like, okay? Now, there are all kinds of methodologies you may be
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using you may find you may go ahead and look for a dissertation or a thesis with even the
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methodology and so forth, there’s a lot of things. But at the very minimum, to bring
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it back to the topic were talking about today you could look at a dissertation from you’re
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department and your field and look at the literature review and see what It looks like.
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Particularly those where your chair or your committee members have supervised those other
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students. See what it looks like, see what your committee members are going to expect
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because lets be honest you guys you know your committee members sign the paperwork, correct?
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Right? They do. And, and, and you want to be in line with there expectations okay?
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Alright. So what you do here is you just go to the library, just the home page you pick
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up the database one, it says search for databases, and it says proquest dissertation so you can
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look for school: Texas A&M University. You can look for the terms in the abstract or
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you can actually look for the terms used in the document text, so your topic end, did
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anybody at Texas A&M in my department or whatever at Texas A&M, write a dissertation with this
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topic used in the text? I think that this is astronomically helpful and a lot of people
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don’t know about it. And it’s a way to do your homework before you do your homework.
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Aright where are we now? We know we have to do a lit review, we have gone to the library
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databases, looked at the subject librarians. We actually have stacks and stacks and stacks
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of printed pdf files in our house in our car in the back seat. How do you wade through
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all of that stuff especially if you have a lot of it? Okay so the deal is you want to
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find out what scholars are saying about your topic, and we already know how to find the
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good ones, the big players, Google Scholar. What are the ongoing debates or conversations
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on your topic? Okay? Is anybody talking about your topic at all? Okay and if they aren’t
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why? And that’s something to think about in terms of making choices, and if people
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are talking, whose talking and what are they talking about? This also helps you organize
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your information you have a copious amount of information when you’re doing your literature
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review. You have lots of information and Brandy and I were talking about this earlier, that
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we gathered all the information then we took a break from the literature review and when
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we went back we had no idea where to start again because we had forgotten everything
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that was in every article. We didn’t really forget, but we kind of did because you almost
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have to be concentrating on that topic intently. You have to be thinking about it and thinking
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about it and you go okay what does so and so say and what does so and so say and what
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does so and so say okay? So what are the ongoing debates within your topic and it may be if
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your in the hard sciences it may be about methodology, why does this methodology work
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better than this methodology? Well this study was done but it didn’t do any good, and
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if your in education there’s a lot of theories in education, education, they love theories
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well the theory is this, well this theory may not be adequate, does this theory work?
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Theory, theory, theory, right?
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What ideas do you agree with? ‘Oh my gosh this guy just has all the answers, you know?
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This is perfect, whatever I do, he gets it, or she gets it and I’m going to follow that.’
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And hopefully once you do a lot of reading you go ‘oh no, no no no, that would never
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work; I can see why they haven’t solved the problem because they’re not looking
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at it in the right way’ correct? And then, this is probably the most important question
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if you’re looking to the literature: what hasn’t been said about your topic? Because
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really what you’re trying to do is find your little niche. What are you going to right
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about? What are you going to study? You don’t want to say something that’s just been replicated.
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Organizing the writing of your literature review is probably the most difficult thing
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that your going to tackle, I think, you know? ‘I’ve got all these articles and I’ve
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read them all and I don’t know where to start? I have a couple of suggestions. You
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probably have good sense of where the conversation is you know you’ve done all this work, you’ve
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done all the reading, you probably have a sense that this scholar doesn’t agree with
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this scholar and this researcher used this methodology but didn’t accomplish what you
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think could be accomplished with this methodology. Or maybe its been looked at in this way but
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not in this way and you think that this would really solve the problem because somebody
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else looked at the problem this way. I was helping a student with her thesis, and she
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is doing a study of what’s called “bull switching” in a waterbuck herd. Basically
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they bring in a male for breeding season. They only want one breeding season to help
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with the health of the water bucks and the survival of the calves, so what they do though
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to keep the herd in tact is they take the bull, bring him in to this breeding season,
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then remove the bull and bring in a vasectomized male for these waterbucks, okay? Well she
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had to do two things: she had to research bull switching in other species because it
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had never been done in the waterbuck species, and she was observing the animals in a semi-natural
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environment as opposed to the wild, as opposed to a zoo. She was looking at it a Fossil Rim
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Park, which is a semi-natural environment where they don’t want you to interfere with
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the natural wildlife, but they do some interference, right? She found literature on, you know,
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bull switching in waterbucks, she found no literature in bull switching in semi-natural
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environments, she found no literature…you know what I’m mean? This is really great