The Literature Search (Bibliography), the Literature Review

THE LITERATURE SEARCH (BIBLIOGRAPHY), THE LITERATURE REVIEW,

AND THE PAPER REFERENCE SECTION

The literature review is an often misunderstood item. To beginners itis often interpreted as requiring you to read, and cite in your paper, everything ever written about your topic. Possibly true for the literature search, but not the literature review. Below I distinguish between these two items and provided suggestions for each.

I. The Literature Search or Bibliography.

You begin with a topic that interests you, one you have encountered in your courses or readings. It should be topic about which you have unanswered questions-- you think there is more to know about this topic than has been covered in your readings so far. You may or may not have a specific research question in mind at this point. Additional readings should help you with this, uncovering what has already been done and helping you to refine your thinking about what could still be done. This is the job of the literature search, to develop a beginning bibliography of books and articles related to your topic that you will need to examine.

To develop this bibliography some begin with an internet or library search engine. While useful at some point during your search this is not the most effective method, nor should it be your primary one. Electronic search engines are highly dependent upon the subject terms you use for your search. At the very beginning of your literature search you probably will not be sufficiently familiar with the key concepts surrounding your topic to do an effective search. Instead, make use of the searches scholars have already performed, the reference sections of published material.

Begin with the work(s) that got you intrigued in the topic. Review their reference sections identifying titles that appear relevant to your research interest. Focus on the references whose titles suggest a close connection with your topic of interest and add them to your bibliography. Every book or article cites a host of works, many of only marginal value. Some are cited for historical reasons but are now considerably out of date. Others are cited to justify or explain a particular statistical technique, but have little connection with the substance of the article. And still others are cited merely to support minor parts of the author’s argument. You will usually have plenty relevant material to read so be selective and include in your bibliography only items that appear relevant to your topic.

From this beginning, you need to go both forward and backwards. The reading that got you interested in the topic may have been published 5, 10, or more years back. You need go forward in time to determine if any more contemporary research has appeared. The most effective approach is to review the tables of contents of the discipline’s significant journals to locate more recent articles.

This may sound like a herculean task, but it is actually quite manageable. First notice that the emphasis is on journals, not scrounging through a library’s card catalog for all relevant books. The most contemporary research usually appears in journals. In some cases the extra length provided by a book is necessary to fully develop and argument and present the evidence relevant to it. Even here, journals again come to your rescue. If a book has provided a critical development in research on an issue it will be cited by the authors of journal articles.

Notice also that the emphasis is on “significant journals,” not all of them. This means the leading general journals of the discipline – APSR, AJPS, JOP, and probably PRQ. These are “general” in that good research is all fields of the discipline are covered. Depending upon your topic you may need to include as well one or twotopspecialized journals that cover your topic area, such as: Comparative Politics,International Organization, Legislative Studies Quarterly,State Politics and Policy Quarterlyand the like. Your professors can help you identify any specialized journals you should consult.

The emphasis is on a limited number of top journals because this is where the most important research relevant to your topic is likely to appear. Leading journals both have a high prestige factors – scholars want their research to appear there – and are known for having rigorous intellectual standards. If research is important it will likely be either published in a leading journal or cited in the reference section by articles appearing in those journals.

Refine and Expand the Bibliography

Once you have a list of relevant articles to review, begin to read them. So far you have used titles only to select items for the bibliography. This means you are likely to have missed some key items and also included others on your bibliography that are of little value. You will need to add the former to, and delete the latter from, your bibliography. Nearly all journals publish abstracts at the beginning of an article. Reviewing the abstract can often help you eliminate articles of little value. Further, the first one to three pages of an article should outline the argument and supporting research appearing in the article.

If the article is relevant, read it. As the authors present their argument and review the literature you will encounter their citations to prior research. Both from the context of the citation and the amount of time spent on, and number of citations to, prior work you should be able to identify important research not yet on your bibliography. Add it. This will often take you back in time by providing a history of research on the topic. Make sure you consult some of the frequently cited early works as well as the most recent ones.

II. The Literature Review.

The literature search produces a bibliography that is for your use. You review the existing literature on a topic to learn what are the key questions people have raised, what concepts have been developed and are in common use (such as schema in political psychology or priming in the campaign literature), as well as the data, models, and variable operationalizations that scholars on the topic have developed. It is through this reading that most scholars also develop ideas about additional questions to probe and ways in which they can be investigated.

The literature search is part of the somewhat mystical logic of discovery. That is the intellectual creativity each scholar brings to topic. It leads them to envision interesting questions, new implications of a theory that could be tested, better ways to measure concepts, or other useful contributions that could be made to a line of investigation. This creative process can often be messy and disorganized, leading off into blind alleys, false starts, and irrelevant side trips before the “Ah Hah” moment comes of something that works.

Compared to the literature search, the literature review is highly focused and organized. There are two common misconceptions about the literature review. The first is that it must cover all prior research on a topic. The second is that it takes place only in a separate section of the paper or chapter of a dissertation. Neither is true.

Do not include all of the literature. Research papers begin with a brief overview past literature and how it relates to your question in the introduction. They then move to Item #II, a deeper examination of the literature. But not a discussion of everything ever written about the topic. The purpose of this latter section is not to impress readers with how much you have read. Instead, its purpose it to expand upon items 2 and 3 of the introductory material – that your topic is an important one about which there remains some unanswered question(s). Stick with this focus.

You begin the literature review describing the early history of research on the topic. In many cases your literature search will have uncovered a long history of scholarly works discussing a topic. Serious scholarly work may have begun in the 1960s or earlier, followed by later research with increasingly sophisticated models and data. If this is the case you will want to very briefly review the early research on the topic. This brief history helps to establish the importance of your topic – that scholars have been examining it for years or decades.

From this beginning you move rather quickly to contemporary research on your topic, the two, three or four key articles or books that scholars treat as our best current knowledge on the topic. You review these items to establish the knowledge gap, that there is more we can learn.

In this latter review do not criticize every possible weakness that might exist in the contemporary research. The purpose of this review is to make an argument for the value of your contribution. If, for example, you are going to develop and test what you believe to be a better model, emphasize why the models past research have used are insufficient. If you are going to test existing arguments with better data, focus on why the data used by past research contains weaknesses. If you criticize some element of existing research you are implying to the reader that you will improve on this element.[1]

With the literature review you are establishing the importance of the topic by showing how much attention scholars have devoted to it in both the past and present. You are also setting up the justification for your own research by identifying weaknesses in the most recent literature. Having accomplished these two purposes you then move on to Item #III, describing how your research addresses the weaknesses you have identified. By the end of the literature review the reader should have a good understanding of your research question, why it is important, and what about it remains unanswered.

The literature review is everywhere. Your use of the prior literature does not take place only in the literature review. Prior literature is cited throughout your research whenever it helps you make your case. Below are some examples.

Introduction / Basics. You give a brief overview of the literature in your introduction to explain what your research will contribute, and expand upon this overview in Item II. At the same time, you also use the literature to identify the importance of the topic. The very fact that a number of scholars have written about the topic, and their research has appeared in leading journals, is often sufficient to establish your topic’s importance. And, of course, part articles will have also discussed the importance of the topic, and you can cite some of their arguments.

Model and Variables. When you conduct your literature search you will make notes of key concepts, variables, variable operationalizations, models, tests, and the like that have appeared in prior research. Scholars do not waste their time reinventing the wheel. Make use of this material.

As you describe key concepts cite prior research that has used them. Similarly, hypotheses may cite prior research that argued for the hypothesized relationships. If using variable operationalizations that others have used in the past, use and cite this material. If you include in your model variables for control purposes only, cite prior works that have argued these variables should be controlled.

In sum, citations to prior research do not begin and end in the literature review section. They usually appear throughout your paper, possibly excepting only the section where you present the results of your own data analysis. Every research paper is a combination of what other scholars have done before you – material you quote or paraphrase and cite – and your own logical / theoretical arguments explaining what you are doing that is new and why it is valuable. Weave the past literature throughout your entire argument. Do not stick it only in the literature review section and assume you are done with it.

III. The Paper Reference Section

A bibliography is for your use. It contains items you should read as part of your background learning about a topic. Textbooks also sometimes include a bibliography listing material a reader may wish to consult for further information about a topic.

The reference section of a research paper is different. Publishers and journal editors are always looking for ways to save space and the cost of printing unneeded pages. So current practice is that the reference section of a research paper should include all items cited in the paper and ONLY items cited in the paper. Do not include material in the reference section that you may have read or believe to be valuable but has not be cited in the paper itself.

IV. Footnotes

Current practice for most journals (excepting a few emphasizing history or philosophy) is to use footnotes sparingly and only for explanatory material, not references. Explanatory material is something you feel needs to be mentioned or commented upon, but is not directly relevant to your narrative and thus does not belong in the body of your paper. If you cite anything in a footnote, that item must also be included in your reference section.

If you read articles or books published in the 1970s or earlier you are likely to find the old footnote system used, but that practice ended for most journals by the 1980s.

[1] You can mention in passing some weaknesses of prior research that you will not necessarily solve, but these should be brief and limited comments, not something you emphasize.