-: Hello and welcome to the video lecture
on how to use secondary research,
how to do research that's already been done
to begin to organize a literature review,
which is very often the first step in any research project.
So in this class, we're gonna learn about how do you select
and read and review literature
and create a literature review.
So first, how do you find it,
some tips on how to read and evaluate it,
how to do some internet research as another activity,
and then some ideas on how to organize a lit review
and some other tips on how to do it well.
So a lit review is a summary of the research
that's been done previously on a topic,
and its purpose is to look at what's already been done.
How do you build on that?
By knowing what's already been done,
it can in many ways guide your next steps.
What are some questions that were left unanswered?
How was it approached in the past?
What do we know?
What's the key background here
that we will wanna know about?
So the questions that you will wanna ask yourself
and which this will answer is what is already known,
and what are the gaps?
So every good literature review ends up with a gap.
What do we don't know?
And in many cases, your research project
will be filling that gap.
You also wanna ask what methods
or problems have been done before?
How did they address it?
What's the current status?
What do we know now?
What's the most up-to-date information
and research on our topic?
There's a number of reasons why.
First, it can help you to design your study
and to interpret the result of it.
It'll show how your work fits into a bigger picture.
It brings the reader up-to-date in many cases
by building on what's already been done.
This can help build a case of why
what you're doing and how you're doing it is important.
And frankly, it makes you look more credible.
It makes you look like you did your homework,
you did your due diligence,
you know what's been done already in this space,
and that you are ready to go to the next step
and build on what's already been done.
These are the key sort of hows
that you want to explain what's been done already.
And you always wanna cite the sources as you mention them.
You can point out ways in which this topic
has been treated before.
And again, by explaining how your work
fits into the past work,
it can make your research question more significant
and sort of build credibility in your own work.
So the first step is to think about what's your topic?
And a really good first approach
is to brainstorm key words.
What are some words that might be out there
that would describe the work that you want to learn about?
What are some synonyms?
What are some other ways in which it might be described?
And you can think about sort of a number of key words
that you would do,
like if you were studying farm to school procurement
in Vermont, that would be a good first step.
First look at farm to school
and then add the word procurement,
then add the word Vermont and see what's done.
And think of synonyms, and take some words out
and add some new words in and see what you come up with.
I very often use Google Scholar. It's one I use.
I think it works well.
Our library also has a number of specialty indices
that can look for, can sort of help you narrow your search
into more specific fields,
and we'll learn more about them.
So there's two main types of things that you can read.
First, the sort of popular press, newspapers, websites,
podcasts, lots of things like that
that are out there but are not
sort of in the scholarly research journal space,
and journal articles, which specifically are
in scholarly research space.
So, it's certainly a fine idea to start off
with what is known about this topic
in the popular press, again, websites, news reports,
magazines, newspapers, even things like podcasts
and videos and things like that.
One of the things that it does is it brings you up to speed
about the discourse of the topic.
What are organizations,
what are sort of, you know, opinion leaders,
what are experts, what are politicians,
what are journalists, what are stakeholders saying about it?
This can provide good background.
it can be a good starting point.
It can sorta help you get your mind around it.
But note that it's not always based on rigorous research.
And we'll learn down the road
about how many times that you cannot always believe
everything that's said on the internet.
But, so look at these with a sort of more critical eye
and in terms of what's being said about it,
rather than sort of what has research shown
is true about it.
And then you can jump into journal articles,
which are sort of a research report of a specific study.
Usually these are in the form of,
they'll start with an introduction,
do a literature review, talk about the methods they use,
the results they found and such.
And many often, these are peer reviewed.
And I'll say a bit on the next slide about what that means.
So a researcher like myself will,
when I am done with a research project,
and very often in my case with a graduate student,
we're working alongside
and sort of me mentoring the student,
writes up the results into the format
of a peer review journal article,
and we submit it to a journal for review.
The first person to see it is the editor of the journal,
who will read it and sort of think
about who are other researchers that do work in this space?
Who would know about this?
Who has the expertise and the knowledge of the topic
and the methods and such
to be able to be a good judge of its merit?
Then, so the editor sends it to these reviewers,
who will read it.
In many cases, they will make a bunch of suggestions
and such, and they will say things like,
"This is rejected, this is total garbage,
not even worth another look."
But many times, they do what's called revise and resubmit,
which is, there's some merit here,
but some things need to be changed
before it's really ready.
And here's a list of the things that need to be changed.
And then it's up to the author
to revise and resubmit.
So when you do this, you'll very often once,
so you do the search and you have a list of articles,
and the first thing you'll wanna do is read the abstract.
Why did they do it? How did they do it?
What did they learn?
Both because this'll help you decide,
is this, you know, does this really
provide relevant background for what I'm doing or not?
And in many ways, too, so it, you know, it helps you decide,
do I wanna read the whole thing, or do I sort of swipe away
and not bother with it?
And it also helps you to frame the article
if you do decide to read it.
So I like to first sort of skim it for major points
and then read and take notes on it.
So sometimes I'll highlight it, some key parts
that I want to make note of.
Another thing that you can do is if you find an article
that's really relevant to what you're doing,
like this is a great one, that this is really close
to what I've done, you know, in subject
or in methods, or both,
that there's ways in Google Scholar to look for,
first, what are other articles by these same authors?
Two, you can look at the studies that they cite.
Who did they build on?
What are the past, when they wrote it,
what were the most relevant past studies
that they cite in their lit review and their work,
as well as sort of moving forward in time
and learning who cited them,
so you can get a list of the articles
that were written after the one
that you're reading at the time,
which shows who are the other articles that cited them.
And you can read those.
And in this way you do a snowball approach,
where you can start with one small handful of snow,
one article, and roll it, roll it, roll it, roll it,
and soon you have a great big snowball,
a great, you know, a long list of articles
that fit your needs.
So when you are reading it,
you always wanna have a critical eye
and look for these things and see if it's a fit, you know,
and also to just sort of have a critically thinking brain
on with all the things that you read.
And we're gonna talk about the research design
and then some of the methods and other parts.
So first, does the design make sense?
Are the purpose and the gap in the questions,
are they stated?
Does their approach build on what's already been done,
and sort of in a logical way?
One big pet peeve of mine is that the uses
of the words methodology versus methods,
that methodology is the study of methods.
And very, very few articles actually have methodology.
A great deal of articles have methods.
I did some interviews, I did a survey, and now I did this.
And when you're just saying what you did,
the best title for that section is methods.
And unless you're diving into the philosophy
of why that method will yield the information that you want,
you're probably best off not claiming
that what's under that heading is methodology.
So you wanna look at the methods.
How did they sample? Who did they talk to?
How did they collect data?
How did they analyze their data?
And how did they report it?
You wanna think about how did they choose
their research subjects, if there are research subjects,
which social science research very often has.
Is it clear how they chose and why?
Why did they talk to the people that they did?
Why did they give the survey or do the interviews
or otherwise collect data from those folks?
Why are they the right ones?
In some cases, you might want your sample
to be so-called generalizable,
that you can say that you can infer to some extent
that my sample looks like the population as a whole,
that it is a, like an accurate representation of it.
And then that way, you can sort of generalize that
to a larger population.
Like we're gonna learn about the Vermonter Poll,
which is a statewide representative poll,
and it might ask a question on, you know,
how important is this thing?
And because of the way that the sample is drawn,
that you can make some sort of credible inference
that since this percentage of the poll said this,
that we can sort of generalize to the state as a whole
and be fairly sure that it represents the overall views
of the state.
Look at how did they collect data?
What methods did they use? Do they make sense?
Do they use the right methods to get the right kind
of information that they want
to address their research questions?
When they do the analysis,
do they use credible techniques and tests?
Do they correctly interpret the data to have sort of,
to report the results?
Are the results meaningful?
Are they tied to the research question?
Can you follow what was done, what was learned,
what's the meaning, what the significance,
that it's the job of the researcher
to clearly spell out these things.
Are they upfront about their limitations?
If they did not use a representative sample,
if they, for example, used,
if we did just interviews of five CDAE students,
we probably can't say that all UVM students
feel that the way that those five did.
And do they suggest future research needs?
There's a lot of information on the internet,
or at least there's a lot of content.
Whether it's information and whether it's all true,
you know, it's important to evaluate the quality
and always have a critical eye towards things that you read,
especially things that are not in peer reviewed journals.
So when you read, sort of, research
or claims on the internet,
do they have a clear point of view?
Do they have an ax to grind?
Do they sort of only tell one side of the story
and leave out a whole lot of relevant things?
Do they cite past studies?
Do the studies they cite, are they up to date?
Did they show that they did their homework,
that they did a lit review
and they have their minds around
what work they've done in the past?
In many cases, official data such as the .gov
or university-based, the .edu
should have been reviewed
and at least should be much more credible than, say, a .com,
you know, like a marketing website
for some product
or some like highly partisan political viewpoint,
probably much less credible.
Are what they say consistent with other findings,
sort of does it pass the smell test?
And if they're really breaking from it,
like if they say no Vermont students
like to ski or snowboard, you know, you'd be like, what?
That doesn't seem right.
And can they show you, well, why do they say that?
What's the basis on which they're making that claim?
So once you have your, the body of studies
that you want to work with,
so you feel like you've read and you've take notes
and you sorta know what are the key parts,
now it's time to think about how do you organize it.
And there are four common ways,
and note that these are not mutually exclusive,
but, and these are not the only kinds,
but you can use one or more of these frames as you do it.
So first is the argument, sort of pro and con.
What are the good things about this?
What are the bad things about it?
Chronologically, first we learned this,
and then we learned this, and then we learned this,
and the most recent thing that we learned is this.
We can do it by the principal dimensions of the concept.
So I know in the sort of food and agricultural work I do,
that you can think about what are the economic implications,
what are the social implications, the environmental,
the nutritional, et cetera.
Or it can be done by the perspectives of the actor
or the stakeholders.
So again, in my view, first this is,
these are the perspectives and the implication for farmers,
then manufacturers, then so on, up to consumers.
If you're doing a university-based one,
that you may wanna talk
about, well, what are the studies that pertain to students?
What are the ones that pertain to faculty, to staff,
to administrators and so on.
There's a true art form of writing a lit review,
that it is an act of curation.
It's like the person at a museum
who wants to make a display, say,
of a certain time and place,
doesn't just throw things up in some sort of random way,
that they carefully curate them
to sort of tell a story of what was happening
in the art world and the broader world
at that time and place.
In the same way, writing a good lit review
is about curating articles to form an argument
and to identify a gap,
and to say these are things that we know
and they all lead us to this place
where we have identified a gap,
something that we don't know
and that we are intending to fill that gap.
And so it's not a laundry list.
It's not just that it must be both curated and organized
to tell a good story,
or more specifically, to form an argument
of this is research that needs to be done by me now.
Two things I've found in student lit reviews
that I want you to avoid,
first is note that the two ways,
that the first one is just too verbose.
There's too many words, that you don't need all that,
just cite it that I and my colleagues found
that this thing and everything above that
from, in the first one, from the word "found" up,
is just sort of fluff that's in the citation anyway.
Another one is to have a long list of claims
and then a whole bunch of citations
at the end of the paragraph,
that you wanna make it clear when you're making a claim,
what claim goes with what citation.
And so if you, the reader, reads a claim
and say, "Hmm, that's interesting," that they can easily go
and find the article that makes that claim,
so they can go and read it and learn more about it.
So here are the key takeaways.
So we talked about what they are
and how they're done, where you can get information,
how to evaluate them and also a bit
about judging resources from the web.
Here's an example of a lit review
written by one of UVM's librarians.
Here's a good guide of just sort of how
to write a lit review.
I think there's a lot of good stuff in there.
And that's it, thank you.