How to Write a Literature Review & Introduction to Citation Managers

all right in the interest of people's times we're going to go ahead and get started um you might have a few people trickling in but thank you for coming i'm linda mccree i'm the director of the graduate school writing center and along with counseling rivera who's from the research commons from the library we are doing this presentation which has a name how to write a literature review and introduction to writing and research at the graduate level or in graduate school so i'll be talking a little bit about writing graduate school in general focused specifically on the genre of the lit review and then also talk a little bit about writing with clarity and i'm happy to answer questions this is not meant to be a particularly formal presentation so please anytime something's not clear or you have a question raise your hand um if for some reason we're getting too many questions and it's becoming distracting i might say wait let's hold those for later but i'm going to do about the first half a little a little more than half and then we'll take a quick break and kelsey will take over and talk about the research library um i'm going to just really quickly introduce the graduate school writing center there are some postcards back there if any of you haven't heard of the graduate school writing center it is as the name would suggest a writing center explicitly for graduate students um it's located here in mckeldin down on the fifth floor basically on the one floor and um exactly diagonally across from where we are now so 5100b mckeldin we operate by appointment only and so you can't just drop in and part of the reason for that is that you can't really just drop in with a graduate school writing paper right so you make an appointment in advance you send your paper whatever you're working on in advance to the we call them writing fellows who are going to read it they have a chance to read it in advance and then you come in and have a conversation about the paper we also do things electronically if you're ever traveling or away we do appointments um online synchronously and online asynchronously as well but the bulk of what we do is face-to-face appointments and i'm happy to talk a little bit more about that as we go along but i'm gonna just go ahead and get started with the presentation too um so really what you're thinking about welcome to graduate school those of you who haven't been here very long and um good for you for still being here for those of you who have been here for a long time because it's not that easy i'm just kind of thinking about what you do in graduate school you're kind of joining this academic conversation at a slightly deeper level right if you think about the move from undergraduate to graduate the shift really is that you've moved from taking all that knowledge in consuming it in a sense and really the idea the further along in graduate school you are um the more you're expected to be the producer of knowledge so you start with analysis and synthesis and evaluation and by the time you're producing a master's thesis and certainly a doctoral dissertation you really want the one producing the knowledge and it's meant to be production a contribution to an ongoing academic conversation um so we're going to talk a little bit about what that means today um and here's what we're going to try to accomplish i'm going to think about what's the connection between research and reading and writing for graduate school and we're going to talk a little bit about the specifics of a lit review and then think about the kind of rhetorical choices that are involved in preparing preparing and shaping a literature review there's some things we're not going to do today in two hours and we really aren't going to focus much on citation issues so any of you that have questions about like this specific way that you do apa um we can help with that but not that's really not ideal in a big group we're not going to work much about talk much about the important thing of time management which is incredibly important for writing in graduate school and your work habits i talk about those in other settings so if you want to hear more about those let me know and i can let you know when we're doing something about that and this is obviously not very discipline specific you're from multiple disciplines um and so this is really a very general introduction i'll be using examples from specific disciplines but this is much more of a general introduction whenever i talk about graduate writing i my background is in rhetoric sorry speaking i come from the english department originally and my background is rhetor in rhetoric and composition and um i always like to start with this metaphor from a famous american philosopher and rhetorician kenneth burke who's writing in the 20th century and burke has this metaphor it's referred to as you can see here as the berkian parlor um that really he meant as a metaphor for why we have rhetoric at all why we argue why we need persuasion right why do we ever need to convince anybody of anything but i think it's a perfect metaphor for graduate school especially for writing in graduate school and i'm going to read it to you because no one reads you in graduate school imagine that you enter a parlor you come late when you arrive others have long preceded you and they are engaged in a heated discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about in fact the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before you listen for a while until you decide that you've caught the tenor of the argument then you put in your ore someone answers you answer him another comes to your defense another aligns himself against you to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent depending on the quality of your allies assistance however the discussion is interminable the hour grows late you must depart and you do depart with this discussion still vigorously in progress and if that doesn't sound a lot like graduate school like you come into a room and everybody's talking about something and you have no idea what they're talking about it sounds like they all know what they're talking about and you're supposed to know what you're talking about too but you don't know um if that doesn't sound like graduate school then you haven't been here long enough yet um but how does this apply to anything so think about that shift from really what you're doing in the early stage of any kind of research project the reading part um is really kind of captured in this you listen for a while until you decide you've caught the tenor of the argument then you dip in your oar and that's a nice encapsulation of what a lit review is right you're listening what is everybody saying what are the big ideas here and then how am i going to put in my voice right but you have to do a lot of listening before you're ready to say something intelligent and dip in your ore so what do you need to be able to do to write a lit review just kind of thinking about that um you need some awareness i think of um the rhetorical and linguistic conventions of relevant texts that's a really big way of saying you need to know how arguments get made and how how people talk in your discipline right in the relevant texts that you're reading you need critical thinking skills probably you brought those with you when you came to graduate school so that's that's an easy one to check off um you need the ability to synthesize information from multiple sources with summary and paraphrase you probably brought that ability with you as well you need to put it in practice now but that's uh you probably brought that with you and really what a lit review really requires is a way to organize um to make an analysis coherent and that's often the really challenging part figuring out so you can do all the reading you can write all the summaries um you know how to think about them but it's the pulling them all together that's often a challenge so i'm going to talk a little bit about how to do that um and the first step really if we think back right if the first step is kind of reading them all and critically thinking and being able to synthesize the information obviously the first step is reading and i would suggest reading actively right as opposed to we often think that when we're reading we're just taking in the information when you're reading especially with an eye to a lit review um then you really need to be reading actively to be thinking about how anything that you're reading is something that you're going to respond to right so how are you standing in that parlor listening to that conversation getting ready to dip in your ore um so one of the ways to think about building uh to reading actively is think about a framework for your reading right to kind of be a little strategic about how you're reading and think about where does this fit in into anything else right so first of all know why you're reading something that sounds really obvious but it's worth kind of thinking about what's your purpose in reading this do you just need to know it it's a landmark case you have to know it it's one of the most important things in your field or you're just kind of skimming it to see whether this is worthwhile knowing about or you're really looking at how they do their methods or this is an important theory and we really understand what your purpose for reading is um and then other obvious things know who the who and the where of the publication right is this someone is this uh an author that really matters is this someone very important in the field this is someone new in the field are they voicing something uh something brand new are they voicing an opinion from kind of outside of your typical field right if you're kind of doing interdisciplinary work what kind of where is this coming from um and which what publication is this is it a really central publication in your discipline is it again somewhere on the periphery is it starting to do some interdisciplinary work so starting to think about how does all this start to fit together is an important way to start building a framework and then you want to think about obviously reading what you probably already do already right read the abstract and the introduction first but what are you getting from those right as quickly as possible and a well-written abstract and a a well-written first-three paragraph should be able to tell you this what's at issue in this article and that's a phrase i'll come back to can what's an issue what are the questions in your field that this is addressing what are those what problems are they is it trying to solve what are the big conversations of your field that it's entering into what's the context right the the abstract of the introduction should tell you a little bit about that what's the context why is this being written where um not only the kind of time frame but also what where is it fitting into a conversation um how does it fit into the intellectual landscape of your field is it contributing to the conversation is it building filling a gap building on uh building on research or on theory entering something new etc um and then also think about what kind of article you're reading and um and maybe you've kind of figured this out already in your field but you can you could make all sorts of categories for the kinds of articles that there are but here are a few that probably appear in most of your disciplines is it a data-driven paper right really it's the result of empirical studies is it a methods paper or it's really about explaining a new method or an app a new application of a method um is it a theory paper is it um there to kind of set a new agenda or raise consciousness about something and obviously if someone if some of you are like what a consciousness raising paper like some of these don't exist maybe in your field or they don't come up as frequently in your field as they do in other fields but they might come up still or is it a review paper itself right so probably especially when you're looking at a lit review you're probably going to look at first to see if there are other reviews of literature about that question is that what this paper is that the goal of of whatever you're reading and then you want to think about how to read right and no one talks about how you read in graduate school except that you should do it really quickly and you should do a ton of it but you also need to be a little bit strategic about it and especially any kind of text that you're going to talk about later on it's a good way to think about reading it closely and being able to have some create some kind of notes about it that are going to make sense to you and that are going to leave you with a good kind of good first steps towards synthesis not just um you've all i'm sure had the experience of reading something and you know it's important in your field and you use a highlighter those of you who still read in paper you take the highlighter and those of you that do it on pdf you still can do it with the highlighter and you land up with an entire page of highlighted material yes this is heaven all of us um and then it's like uh what do i do with that like that whole page is really important but i can't just take that whole page and put it in my paper right how do i start to process that so glossing is a way to kind of give you something a way to process what you're reading right not just to say this is all incredibly important but how am i going to use it so um flossing for reading i also talk about glossing for writing although i won't talk about that here today it's a pretty simple and straightforward process um and it helps you understand the rhetorical conventions and the linguistic conventions of the field as well as understanding the content right so for every paragraph or you could do this for every section every page whatever whatever kind of chunk you need to for every paragraph we'll call it um you want to make yourself a quick gloss quick note to the side on a post-it on a you know a comment frame and on your pdf with your pencil however it works um a quick note about what the paragraph is saying kind of sentence long summary what it's saying and and also a comment about what's it doing what's its function within the article and your goal here is both to understand the substance the content but also the structure of what's going on right because one of the things that you need to learn to write in your field is what the structure of your field looks like where do arguments happen what kind of background happens how do arguments get put together um so glossing really is a kind of interpretive reading strategy um well i repeated the basic how to's twice that's right you can use them twice it's not the same as responding right probably some of you also read and you write notes in the margins saying things like what an idiot or that's a great idea or that really complicates how i thought about x um that's not quite glossy glossing is much more like summarizing so let's try here's a paragraph from something probably not none of you ever had the need to read because it's from a law journal the georgetown law review um and it's the first paragraph of an article on the philosophy of intellectual property so it's the first paragraph so you can already think about how it functions um in the century since our founding the concept of property has changed dramatically in the united states one repeatedly mentioned change is the trend toward treating new things as property such as job security and income from social programs a less frequently discussed trend is that historically recognized but nonetheless atypical forms of property such as intellectual property are becoming increasingly important relative to the old paradigms of property such as farms factories and furnishings as our attention continues to shift from intangible to intangible forms of property we can expect a growing jurisprudence of intellectual property so if you were to do a quick gloss summarizing that paragraph what would be in your gloss i'm going to ask you to actually take a minute and jot down some notes or try to formulate the sentence in your head or just try it a sentence saying what is it a summary of its content and then a sentence that summarizes what this paragraph is doing what's its function in the article 15 more seconds anybody want to try and summarize the content of the paragraph lost the content that's right the the content of sorry what was your word the concept the concept of property has changed from farms i can't say over the farms factories and furniture things to intellectual property anybody have something different something everybody had something kind of like that i suspect right i did too oops oops i gave you both of them all right well sorry historically what we've considered property has changed and intellectual property is becoming increasingly important right so kind of putting it in your own words and then i gave you that i don't know why i didn't have animated to come up one at a time right obviously the paragraph is the introduction that's how it's functioning but what is it doing as the introduction right it's kind of establishing why the argument matters right why do we have to start being concerned about intellectual property and that's it and you can see the benefit here right when you go to write a summary later if you have 20 of those boxes that's you can get to a summary much faster than if you have six pages of underlined or highlighted material even if you had you know only 20 sentences of highlighted material you're still spending the time doing the the kind of analysis right putting it in your own words as opposed to just highlighting that it's important so glossing is a way to make sure that you're understanding it um and also a way to start seeing how the arguments get established how how discourse moves in your field questions about that i said i'd also mention it for writing later so this is actually also this is for reading but it's a great tactic to use on your own writing when you have a draft and you have a draft and you're like i don't know what to do with this next how do i revise it's also called reverse outlining so you look at your draft and you kind of gloss your own draft like here's my main point here's my main point again here's my main point again hmm right that's a good clue that the structure maybe isn't what you wanted so um good for a good good for consuming what you um what you read but also for analyzing what you've produced all right let's think a little bit more specifically now that you've done all that reading we've covered reading in 20 minutes um what are you actually doing in a lit review so what is a lit review and where does a good literature review begin and i've already given you a hint that this is a trick question so this is one of those guess what the teacher is thinking questions but where does a good lit review begin any ideas a definition of the idea that you're reviewing okay that you need to that it needs to actually start with that um concept that's a great that's a great point um it comes up it brings up something i'm going to talk about later too what else okay who are the people out there that are doing what you want to do right so who are the important names so kind of establishing that who's who who are the people that are saying important things okay anything else it starts with the general idea about your subject okay so kind of knowing what kinds of important questions your subject is after anything else any other nominations those are all right and so is mine which is different which is it starts with a research question right so um so specifically when you get to do a literature review for your master's thesis or for your dissertation or even when you're doing the kind of you know three paragraphs of lit review for a seminar paper right you should be driven by what is it that i'm trying to ask too right so of course it fits into what are the questions in my field what am i what it's fitting into and then obviously you're starting with what is this thing that i'm talking about right that kind of definitional question but it's also about what am i trying to answer right where am i you start with your here's the big question i want to answer who else is looking at the that question what other how else is that question being asked how else is it being answered right so thinking about it starts with a question um just like any other research project um and oh that was mine get it you're dipping in your here's my action um and the other way to think about this is that um a lit review is evidence that you're a scholar before you're a researcher and for some of your fields that may not seem right right those of you that are doing very applied fields where you're in labs and you're doing your own research no you feel like you're a researcher first but of course you're still entering into that parlor of discussion and need to know what's happened beforehand and um and in the lit review you're just kind of explaining what's happened beforehand too right so it's that lit review is being showing that you've been a scholar before you were a researcher right review also helps you discover and move toward filling some gap in the research that's probably a concept that you've heard of before right any of your research is always answering a question like what's the gap what's missing how do i um how do i find fill a gap sometimes it's how do i create a gap that i can then fill right um the other thing that you're doing in a literature review is establishing your credibility right who am i to say that any of this matters um who am i to answer a question you first have to kind of prove that you have the credibility that you know what other people have said so you can step in and start be part of that conversation as well so you're the credible hulk that didn't get the wrath thank you um another way to think about this and for some of you um this will be more familiar territory i don't know how many of you have ever heard of bloom's taxonomy and any of you that are in education i'm sure have um bloom was a education researcher from the 50s and there this there are multiple versions and is the revised version of understanding how how knowledge builds right first you have to know things and then in the end you create things and the type there is a little bit small this doesn't have a pointer uh there it is um right so really you're if you think about it you're at a lit review is kind of at the analysis stage right so you're here can can the student distinguish between different parts can you appraise compare contrast criticize differentiate discriminate distinguish examine experiment question and test right you're kind of right there in a lit review before you get to you're doing a little bit of evaluating too but before you get to creating your own point you're kind of in that analysis you have to do all the knowing and understanding before you get to before you get to the making your own part so you're kind of in the analysis piece so if that's if that's a helpful way to think about a lit review there it is uh what else a little bit more in generic terms a good lit review synthesizes previously published knowledge about an issue or a practice right it says what's come before you um it's there to help your reader right why are you doing this often it feels like an exercise right certainly um in a in a you know dissertation it probably really feels like an exercise like you're just have to show that you are that scholar before you can be a researcher but if you think about any lit review yeah reviews that you've read in published material they're there to help the reader um they're there to say okay reader you don't have time to know all of this i've done that heavy work and i'm giving you a synthesis right that's that may seem more or less true in your field this is um it's easy to think about this in in medicine you see a ton of um lip reviews in in the medical field right oh this is all the stuff that's happening you don't have time active doctors don't have time to know all this so i'm doing all this so that you can just read the review and you can get the main ideas i've done all the synthesis work and that's the way they're supposed to work for any any discipline they establish the ground for existing knowledge to be extended and they're supposed to lead the reader through a kind of narrative of what's passed here's what's been done in order to clear a space for future argument and there's that idea that it's a narrative um comes up repeatedly right that review is a narrative and i'll talk about that in just a second so that's what they are what can go wrong when you do a lit review anybody tried one and know all the pitfalls i see if he smiles what can go wrong or what's hard nothing they're easy that's why you came in on a beautiful fall afternoon go ahead knowing where to stop right this is the question i get all the time where do i stop right and that's a question that i can't answer for you right that's really that's in part one of the hardest questions that's a question that you have to decide with your advisor right how far back do you need to go when do you um when do you really have a good sense of the field um what else what are the other challenges what else makes them hard or what can go wrong how to organize them is definitely the big challenge i saw another hand staying on track right because it's easy to kind of go off in in different directions right so being able to really do that synthesis anything else i think i have all those and some more um it's not systematic or comprehensive enough right um it may focus on the wrong sources so you don't know if you've pulled in the right things it can seem to lack a sense of purpose where it goes up on the wrong track um feels like it's a collection of things without ever really being a clear sense of synthesis what i see professors saying when i um first time i did this i did a ton of reading about what what are the problems graduate students writing lit reviews and the number one problem that professors complained about was they're just annotated bibliographies they're just a list of sources and that's not what they need to be they need to be doing that synthesis they need to be doing that heavy lifting of synthesis um but wait there's more that can go wrong right um you can assume that you're too for too much familiarity with the sources right that's a kind of delicate balance are you uh if you're only talking about texts that everybody else has talked and knows about then why are you talking about them you're being too familiar in your discussion and often when they're very close to you when you've read them at a lot of times or it's easy to feel too familiar with them and not represent them to your reader effectively enough um maybe for some you're failing to distinguish what's fact from what's opinion in some fields um too many generalizations poor organizations which then makes the reader's job um problematic but wait there's more um i think the biggest one that can be really boring and formulaic right part of the reason that they're challenging to write is that it very much sometimes i think feels like an exercise that you're just kind of have to slog through this and do it it's just a step in an exercise um that people don't say wow that was the most fascinating lit review i've ever read in my life um there they have to follow some kind of formula and so it's harder to make them a little more exciting but they can be because in many ways they're very much a narrative right just kind of a manner of thinking about a narrative in the right way they're a research narrative they're telling a certain kind of story now i have to caution by saying that doesn't mean that they should be presented in the way that you found them right so they're not the kind of journey that you took like first i read this and then i read this and then i wrote this and then i write this and then i write this that's the journey of your reading and it's not necessarily the synthesis that's going to be useful for your um audience for your readers um so they're a narrative but be careful what kind of narrative narratives have settings right so they your lit review should have some kind of context to it how what's the context that it's fitting into what's that research question that it's answering has characters obviously the the kind of big names in the field the kind of movements in the field things like that has actions what's changed what's developed across the field across time a narrative leads audiences where you the author want them to go right a good lit review is positioning um the the story of the research so for your readers so that they can see that the next step that you're taking which is whatever new research you're generating is necessary right so you're leading them to the point where they say aha of course that's the step that needs to happen next so you're leading them through with some room for their own adventures right you're also kind of leading them to think ah there's other things maybe that need to happen here as well um and then who are you you're the talented scholar engage the fierce articles tame them to make them really burning questions that sounds very tongue-in-cheek but in a sense that's really right you're there to kind of be the one who pulls everything together tames things and makes things kind of show what they're why they're important um their narrative in another way too a good lit review is an argument right it's answering a question and that's an argument or should be uh it's not just a list of summaries it should be persuasive right you're communicating to your readers that that the um the research the background that you're explaining has some kind of story and that you're highlighting the important things to your work right here are the important highlights that precede your work one more i think about why it's a narrative kind of thinking about um a comparison because i hear this all the time professors say my students need to learn that their writing needs to be a narrative science is a narrative sociology is a narrative everything's a narrative what does that mean though right when your concept of a narrative comes from fiction what does that mean so so there's a nice kind of parallel right so here are the kind of elements of a narrative from fiction from stories right and there are your narratives on the side for a little bit right you're offering your readers a kind of unfolding of discovery just like a kind of classical journey or quest right in most research there are some obstacles that have to be overcome um and that makes for a kind of plot and there's arrangement in a narrative right you're arranging those obstacles or those moments in history those moments of context in a way that makes sense um and and in in fiction we look for that arrangement to have some kind of narrative tension right here are the things that need to unfold what's gonna happen next so some other ways to think about um lit reviews as a little bit more than an uh annotated bibliography um and then questions what should my lit review do my guess is that these are some of the questions you have um you'll probably have others as well and you can tell me what they are should your narrative should your lit review rather focus only on very recent publications yes should your narrative should your lit review um uh ignore anything that's not in your immediate discipline right you only need to look in your immediate discipline should it be organized chronologically and can develop chronologically what the most important texts through time um should it begin with some kind of historical overview of the field all of that really depends right so those are questions that are important to ask they're not questions that i can answer generically for everyone's lit review right but those are kind of rhetorical questions and contextual questions that you have to answer why would you only focus on very recent publications in your lit review why would you ignore something from say 1990 right because the research has changed and depending on your field you don't care about things that happen that far back right things are built on things and you don't need to look that far back for anything why on the other hand would you look at something from saying 1985 in your litter view right because you do want to say the context goes back that far right you're kind of offering a different kind of context right um many of you will ignore work that's not in your immediate discipline right but those of you who are doing anything that's even vaguely interdisciplinary may need to look beyond your immediate discipline right should you organize chronologically again that really depends what are you telling a story about a certain development through time or is that not the way that you need to be addressing this um and do you need to begin with some kind of historical overview of your field maybe depending on the kind of question that you're asking right so those are some of the questions that you'll want to ask and um and i can't answer them easily but those are important ones for you to think about um there are a few different types of lit reviews um and here's this is a quote this is from a criminal justice i don't think any of you are in criminal justice but um but i think many of these uh categories still work for many of your fields not all of them generally speaking lit reviews will have one of three types of focus focuses they may be integrative right summarizing past research based on overall conclusions of past research they may be more theoretical identifying and critiquing the ability of different theories to explain a phenomenon or they may be more methodological highlighting different methods a different methodological methodological approaches used in past research and the contributions of each type of research and focus they may also be narrative you often hear of narrative lit reviews that really do kind of tell the story of a kind of question or a kind of approach so different ways to cut up the category questions so far jump into the next big issue then which is the organizing right so once you've done the reading and you start thinking about what are the big questions what are the big questions how am i addressing this how am i starting to pull things together then you finally do have to do the organizing and i like this image right because there's all sorts of ways to organize those little clay things right we could organize them by size you can organize them by color you could organize them by whether or not they have a hole in them you can organize them by um size and color and whether or not they have a whole right category subcategory subheading all sorts of ways to organize things and there's that's usually what happens for a lit review right there's not just one way to organize it so do you organize by a theoretical framework by sample size and number of cases by the kind of application stress by types of studies by the source of a study by discipline by chronology by issue or aspect again no one answer for some fields the answers will be more obvious than for others but but you want to have some way of organizing things right some organizing principle and those are some ways that you might think about it putting that all together probably a good idea to make yourself some kind of spreadsheet-like thing even if you're in the humanities like me and a spreadsheet feels like the most foreign thing in the universe right some way to think or um in some organized fashion or try to keep things maintained in a list and be able to see and compare things right so whether it's by study and then your categories across the top matrix are whatever they are right year theory sample size model that's a kind of social science approach but all sorts of other potential questions across the top like purpose of study method um all sorts of ways to analyze that or to organize that rather other things about organizing you might think about identifying studies and each each study then in turn may consist of many findings you think about categories of the findings of those studies might think about recognizing threats to the validities of study so all kinds of questions about organizing if something like that rigid doesn't work for you something like that may work better at a kind of mind map and you can easily if you haven't already discovered this you can easily um search online for a mind map that you can fill in and you do that right so you know your big ideas and then which ideas spring from those helping color code them have things branching off of other things so if that works better for your method that's a kind of organization too looks very different than the than the um spreadsheet version but it's also a kind of organization um and then i'm going to suggest a different kind that i think fits in with both of those uh ways of organizing and that's something that again comes from rhetorical theory um and and it's um stasis theory and probably something you've never heard of and yet you actually have heard of that you do all the time so stasis theory as i said comes from rhetorical theory and the idea is asking what is at issue in something and where do we have some kind of disagreement so stasis is where we can't move anymore right things are at stasis we can't we our argument our agreement can't go forward we can't agree because we were kind of stuck at a point where we don't uh where we can't we can't find common ground anymore um comes from legal theory originally and if you think about um there had to be a very organized way to understand in any kind of court situation or a kind of legal case um what was that issue at any point if you think about a law case you have to decide something before you move on to something else so you don't start with um i have a dead body you're going to jail right there's all sorts of steps in between like how do we go from discovering a dead body to putting someone in jail what kinds of things have to happen we investigate right exactly right we first think about what exactly happened here how did this person die was there someone to blame or not was it natural causes was it something else what else you watched law and order i know that evidence that it looks at what what kind of what are we looking for from evidence okay that something happened right okay and then what else it's possible that we find that in fact someone did it and they still don't go to jail why hmm south right there were some kind of mitigating factors right it was self-defense it was really an accident it was um it was uh reasonable homicide or whatever i'm not a lawyer obviously right so all those there's all sorts of steps and at any one point things change right so if we find this body and we decide it was uh murder one set of things happen one set of things happens if we find this body and we decide it was natural causes a very different set of things happens right um so stasis theory helps us understand those and so here they are it's a series of questions um they exist in a in an order not in a hierarchy necessarily but in order and you'll probably see that some of your field that all of your fields ask some of these questions and some of your fields care about some of these questions more than others right so we first of all have to understand have to have agreement about issues of fact what happened what exists um does a problem exist what happened what causes it what's out there right um and then we think about questions of definition well okay it exists then we think about what to call it right so the dead body existed what caused it then we decide well we call it murder we call it suicide we call it natural causes etc so how do we define this thing and then we think about how good or bad something is well how bad was that how you know how do we judge its impact and then finally we think about questions of action okay well we agree with all those kinds of things we agree it was we agreed what happened we agreed what to call it we agree it was bad then we can think about what do we do about that and we can certainly have disagreements about what do we do about that so those exist in a kind of hierarchy or rather a kind of order i should say and then there's also the questions that um about who who gets to decide at any point and those going to exist outside of any kind of order right at any point we could say who gets to decide what this is who gets to decide what we do about it who gets to decide what we call it um if i say pluto right what's pluto when you were a child pluto was a planet yes and now it's not how did that happen how did that happen why is pluto no longer a planet does anybody remember this wasn't that long ago it is right it kind of that so pluto has continued to exist right nothing about its existence changed um but something about its cataract categorization changed right so we started calling it something else um and then that led to different actions right we started categorizing it differently so it's now we we we don't teach that it's a planet etc etc and along the way there was a question of who got to decide who got to decide and i think now maybe pluto is a planet again or something like that because kids said no we won't put it something like that right so that question of who gets to decide at any point so i'm going to stop that actually i'm not going to stop i'm going to go one more so there's because this is rhetorical theory um and it's a theory not anything else um and and rhetoric always seeks to describe what's happening rather than be prescriptive so there's a kind of alternate theory and that's this version of stasis um also with questions about jurisdiction you can see that for some the question of fact and then definition and then we start thinking about causes so that's that's the kind of big difference is is the quest are the questions of cause way up right up there with the questions of existence or do they come later can we agree that there's an existence of something without agreeing on the cause those i think work differently for different fields and again it's a descriptive um it's its value is to describe not to prescribe so but i'll leave those there for a minute i want to ask you what are the what are the most important questions in your discipline and what category are they in does your discipline really focus on questions of action or is it stick with questions of existence or the questions of existence get resolved really quickly and you're really concerned about questions of definition or questions of value i can play first right so english we care a little bit about questions of existence right when people discover new texts but we're often large we make arguments about definitions right what counts as a sonic what counts as a poem what counts as a when does something become a play what's the comparison between a film i just heard an argument this morning that or yesterday about um shakespeare maybe being more like a movie script than a modern play right so that which category does something fit into we argue a lot about questions of value how good is something and sometimes about questions of action but most of those questions of action are about what goes into a canon what should get taught what's an important text all right your turn what does your field do what kinds of questions what's your field first of all okay okay all right okay so lots of questions about definition and then kind of questions of cause too right what how does it work how does it operate okay anybody else what kinds of questions predominate your field anybody see that their field does all of them what fields you in i can guess was going to say you must be in education why explain why it works through all of them right okay okay right right and probably and if you were in policy the same kind of we could say the same thing with slightly different words right all the time you're thinking about what's the problem that exists how do we categorize it what's causing it um how much does it matter how good or how bad it is and what are we gonna do about it right so for some fields we do you do like look through all those now there might be more greater arguments at some stasis than in others right so that a problem exists maybe you don't need to spend a lot of time making you know creating agreement about that right there's easy agreement that a problem exists and maybe most of your disagreement is about what exactly should we do about it other fields you probably never really get into questions of action anybody in physics no then i could just talk about it as if i know something right so um theoretical physics doesn't really care much about questions of action right until it's questions of how are we going to get the money to study these questions right they're largely about what exists out there right what is happening what's causing something not too maybe not too concerned about questions of value right um so different fields are predominantly looking at different questions anybody else want to try what's your what kinds of questions your field looks at no that's okay that's all right so those are good questions to be able to understand and i'll explain why i'm using them in a second so stasis could be a good way to help you organize a lit review right thinking about well what's the problem what kinds of problems are out there how has it been addressed how has it been defined where are there kinds of disagreements about issues of definition um etc etc right and so there's my grid for stasis theory and i'll show you how this works in fact this is you probably can't see this very well this is from a clinical psychology journal right recent advances in developmental and risk factor research on eating disorders and um and the key words tell us something about the fields right eating disorders risk factors development anorexia bulimia binge eating disorder and the title tells us right it's asking something about what's new right what's what's new recent advances what's happening what exists out there and then in developmental and risk factor research what causes right those are the stasis that it's theses that it's addressing right away in the title um and then here's the abstract and show you how kind of the abstract itself goes through the steps of um of the stasis right so the opening sentence and of course the abstract represents the article as a whole right um the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders the dsm-5 currently recognizes three primary eating disorders anorexia nervosa bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorders these exist right they're not arguing about that right there's no argument that these things exist right they exist they're stating that case and moving on the origins of eating disorders are complex and remain poorly understood ah they exist but we don't really know why right so their cause is definitely at issue however emerging research highlights a dimensional approach to understanding the multifactorial ideology of eating disorders as a means to inform assessment prevention and treatment efforts new research is helping us understand their causes right and we can start to assess prevent treat in other words we can look at their causes we can think about how important they are right what kind of value to assign to any of those right assessment prevention and then treatment right prevention and treatment those are questions of action um this is the long part right guided by research published since 2011 this research summarizes recent findings elucidating risk factors for the development of eating disorders across the lifespan of three primary domains genetic biological psychological and socio-environmental prospective empirical research in clinical samples with full syndrome eating disorders is emphasized with added support from cross-sectional studies where relevant the developmental stages of puberty and the transition from adolescence to young adulthood are discussed as crucial periods for the identification and prevention of eating disorders we're going to look at risk factors most of this article looks at causes right most of this is about causes and then their conclusion the importance of continuing to elucidate the mechanisms underlying gene by environmental interaction and eating disorders is also discussed so we're going to consider causes but there's also some underlying question of what's really important right how do they matter and so we can see that they they're not they didn't quite get to questions of action a little bit but not too much right there this article is largely focused on looking at causes but they start with here's what exists um in the article itself it actually offers some definitions of all those eating disorders it doesn't show up in the abstract but the article did so this is what exists here's what we call everything and then let's think about the causes oh oops and there's the final about action finally controversial topics all right um so thinking about using stasis theory for organization right thinking about what exists out there is there some dispute about what exists what terms are important are any terms being disputed right so the idea of we start with defining what that thing that we're studying right what how do we is there any disagreement about this term that we're using um are there are the causes at issue are the effects at issue um is you know what's good and bad beneficial or not important or not in this issue and then how do we resolve this issue what are we doing about it what policy can be put in place so those are the kinds of questions that you may be asking in your lit review you may only be asking some of those right you may just be looking at definitions existence and definitions you may be mostly focusing on causes but thinking in that order can help help too and again this is this is very kind of the way the western mind categorizes things right again that's a descriptive system um i'm going to skip this example not because talking about toxicology isn't fun but because i think i'm running out of time all right so how do you start a lit review so we've gone through thinking about doing the reading thinking about pulling together the synthesis thinking about organizing it but where did you where do you think about actually starting right so the rhetorical situation which is the situation that you're arguing into right um think about the that as the context of the rhetorical event right so the rhetorical situation is where is my argument what do i need to think about to make this argument what's at issue who's my audience um and then this set of constraints right which is a fancy way of saying what's my purpose um what's the genre that this is going into where's my exigence and i'll come back to that in a second right so is your so whether your lit review is an entire chapter of your dissertation or four paragraphs of your seminar paper or a quick um or a final slide or a find a corner um a corner frame on your poster presentation right those are different kinds of constraints they're going to shape the way it it's articulated um so think about who's your audience first of all um who is this whoops who is it for i'm sorry i got ahead of myself who's it for why are they reading it are the same things that you were asking yourself about well who what am i um what am i doing reading this for why is your audience reading it same kind of questions thinking about what are the constraints how much space and time do i have to do this what do people already know what can and can't be discussed in the amount of time or space that i have those are important constraints and then this question of exigence why am i doing this so exigence if that's a not a term that's familiar exigence is a concept that explains why does this matter and why does it matter now right it's kind of sense of creating a need for what follows right something being exigent you've created a sense that it's important at a particular time um lloyd bitzer is a another 20th century rhetorician who who said that exigence we could explain by it's an imperfection marked by an urgency right so it's a gap that needs to be filled and often we have to create that sense of urgency as academics right why is something all that important why is it important it may be very important to your audience it may not be very important to your audience um and you need to create that sense of urgency so thinking about how your how you shape the exigence the reason you're giving people to read this the reason that it's important is is part of your argumentation and it's really the beginning of your argumentation right it's where you start um and then after kind of it's um establishing why someone's gonna care enough to read it why it matters why people want to pick it up and you're spending some time thinking about what's the background here what how much background do i have to give my audience give my readers to know things um you might think about this as the statement of the case i go back to kind of thinking about legal discourse right again i know you watch law and order um how much what do you have to do in your opening uh in your opening your opening statement right what what do you give about the background of the case right what's the story of this issue how are you contextualizing how broadly do you want to contextualize it um who really cares right what disciplines matter here who cares right which scholars which public so you're really kind of thinking about how you frame your issue how broadly how narrowly you're framing it how you're telling that story and i'm going to look at an example here and this is an example from business the employment and this is a review article the employment interview a review of current studies and directions for future research so about doing an employment interview something you probably all had to do at some point so how are they how does this author kind of creating that sense of exigence why does this matter and then also establishing the background so here's the opening paragraph employment interviews are a popular selection technique from many viewpoints in organizations around the world employment interviews continue to be one of the most frequently used methods to assess candidates for employment here's a string of citations among organizational decision makers interviews have been found to be the assessment method most preferred by supervisors and human resources practitioners moreover applicants perceive interviews as fair as compared to other selection procedures and applicants expect interviews as part of a selection process in fact from an applicant's perspective obtaining a job interview is fundamental to job search success how has professor mackin created a sense of exigence here even if you don't care about this how has she created a sense that maybe you should care about this because i'm guessing you're not a most of you are not readers of human resource management review and yet how she created a sense of exigence right clear sense of stakeholders i think i have them highly oops no i don't have them highlighted right a clear sense of who cares about these things right um and and the breadth right candidates care decision makers care human resource practitioners care applicants care so much that without an interview they feel like the job you know the job interview the job search process hasn't even happened right so she's saying here's the broad sense of things right so who cares is what she's saying right lots of people care therefore it's a question worth looking at um this is the next paragraph i think um the employment interview has also been a popular topic among researchers for almost 100 years and is still garnering considerable research interest notably numerous meta-analyses have revealed that structured interviews can display relatively high levels of validity without the adverse impact typically found with cognitive ability tests while we have learned much about the employment interview current research activity suggests that more remains to be uncovered in the last six years since posthumour morgenson and campion's comprehensive review of the employment interview literature over a hundred new articles have appeared in journals and books examining the interview so what's she doing here to set up the context right she's saying giving a certain breath right we've been doing interviews for over a hundred years right and or rather researchers have been caring about how they do that how we do we how we do employment interviews for over a hundred years right so it has a long history um she notes there was this review rather recently right 202 i think this article was is only uh 2008 right so there's already been so much more about this right obviously this is something that people care a lot about and she she kind of stretches the um background back right for 100 years people have cared and then narrowly focuses it and yet since 2002 there have been all this there's been 100 new articles so we should continue to care about it so there's that sense of how she establishes the background um oh there are my highlights i didn't have them in order right all right one last thing before we start thinking about how you actually do the research that gets you to the writing and that's um once you've done the reading figured out how to pull it all together started to create your back or your egg created exigence created a background then you actually have to write it that's the fun part right um and so thinking about how you help your reader follow through things and talk a little bit about just general guidelines for clarity in your writing and i'm going to do that based on the work by a linguist in a rhetorician from an article called the science of scientific writing which is great advice if you're writing um in the scientific in one of the scientific disciplines but it's also great advice if you're not so it's really um gopin and swan talk about how to make your writing clear by using what reader by i'm thinking about what readers expect from your writing so here's the paragraph um from their uh piece information is interpreted more easily and more uniformly if it's placed where most readers expect to find it right the same logic of put your shoes where they belong every night so you can find them in the morning when you're in a rush right um we expect we find things most easily when they're where we expect to find them readers have relatively fixed expectations about where in the structure of prose they will encounter particular items of substance if writers can become consciously aware of these locations they can better control the degree of recognition and emphasis a reader will give to various pieces of information being presented good writers are intuitively aware of these expectations that's why their prose has what we call shape and if i were to change one thing it would be that not good writers aren't intuitively aware but they've developed that intuitive awareness right um and so gopro and swan talk about the kind of linguistic expectations in english so other languages have different expectations but here they are in english and actually i've just talked about i'm going to talk about three that they talk that they discuss about how you can write to uh follow your readers expectations so the first is readers in english readers expect a grammatical subject to be followed immediately by the verb think about those sin those of you who were our native speakers and learn to read in english the simple sentences the dog walked bob and sue ran right subject followed immediately by the verb we start getting in trouble when we separate the subject and the verb right if i say yesterday i on my way home on the in the car with four children during a long drive across the bay bridge while i was hungry and someone in the background was crying and you're like what is happening and we do that in fiction to create a sense of tension and that's great and you do it in storytelling all the time but you don't necessarily want to do that in academic writing right in academic writing you want things to be clear because the concepts are pretty complicated right so the story of my drive back yesterday from the eastern shore is not that complicated um but the story of whatever you're doing in your research is far more complicated right so again these aren't rules and there are always times when we do flaunt or we do um disturb people's expectations for very good reasons right what we do in fact in academic writing create some kind of tension or not um not answer the not put the subject and the verb together immediately but for the most part for clarity we want to put the subject and the verb together immediately so this is a paragraph from a former maryland professor in education june on this is about policy technology and practice in cyber charter school so here's a paragraph and i'm guessing even if you're not in education you have no problem following this paragraph from a pedagogical perspective cyber schools might introduce new ways of delivering education for example students may learn at their own pace and outside of the constraints of traditional school hours furthermore the history of evidence on student achievement in distance learning suggests that online schooling online schooling applications perform no worse when compared to classroom instruction although the authors of the meta-analysis found no significant differences between distance education and classroom instruction in terms of learning gains or losses there are numerous benefits of cyber schools from a policy perspective cyber charters may be able to offer an educational quality comparable to that of traditional schools but also reach underserved populations that need a more flexible educational option for example recent media reports have highlighted how students are using cyber schools to finish their high school credits relatively easy to understand and part of that's because professor ahn follows this rule of his subject is followed immediately by his verb so there that i don't know how well you can see that the subjects are in green and the verbs are in purple and they're almost always right next to each other right from a pedagogical perspective cyber schools might introduce for example students may learn furthermore and we can see that sometimes the subjects are pretty long right they have long noun phrases and that's really common in academic writing right that our subjects are these really long noun phrases like the history of evidence on student achievement and distance learning that's a pretty long noun phrase right but the fact that the verb is right there helps right because if it was uh if he separated those it would be even harder to to follow those um there mm-hmm great well so it's often it is right and so um i mean this one in this paragraph it's not um except in that where we see right where it says cyber charters may be able to offer right so it often is and and i'm glad you brought that up right so we it's not always but it's what comes before is usually fairly brief right and it's it's the transition and connections right so from a pedagogical perspective subject verb right for example subject verb furthermore subject verb although subject verb so um so it doesn't have to be and again it's not a rule right so you it is that we expect them first and when they're not first it's usually because we're putting some kind of connective tissue in place right and that's what we see here definitely right for example although what else is he saying furthermore but i'm glad you asked that that's a good question um all right let's go to the second one the second one is even simpler readers expect a unit of discourse to serve a single function and make a single point right and we forget that because when we're writing we have so many things to say and you push it all in there right so if anybody's ever told you your sentences are too long your paragraphs are you know three pages long a single unit of discourse and that's complicated right because a unit of discourse is a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph or a whole paper or a whole dissertation theoretically right should have a single focus um and the and obviously we have lots of foci making up a bigger point right um but that idea that we should if there are too many ideas in one unit of discourse that becomes a more more of a challenge for readers to uh to understand and so here's the um here's another paragraph from the same article this is right after a heading and you can see how even though it builds on it develops a point it's always the same point right cyber schools within the broader charter landscape the terms used to describe online education are varied and often confusing rice noted that distance education distance learning e-learning web-based instruction virtual schools and online terms online learning are all terms used interchangeably to describe this broad somewhat confusing and constantly changing field of non-traditional instruction other terms include virtual education cyber schools and e-schools in this article i used the terms cyber online and virtual schools interchangeably to mean the public and private institutions that deliver instructions using the internet in the k-12 setting there are different types of virtual schools spanning from state level programs to individual charter schools as table 1 shows cyber charters are just one form of online school among several that currently serve students in the k-12 system so he's developing a point but the bigger point is to define that term right what is the term that i'm using the terms used right that we use a lot of terms here they are here's the one i'm using right so each sentence contributes something and the bigger point is lots of terms here's the one i'm using right so you can see how that works and then the last one and this is my last point is in some ways the most complicated one and yet very useful we expect readers expect the information new information right information to be emphasized comes at the ends of units right the end of a sentence right that we build up to a new point the end of a paragraph if you ever learn to like put your main idea at the end right or to put your your big new idea at the end of a paragraph um we expect new information at the end and we expect the beginnings of sentences to be a kind of link back to things right so the beginning of a sentence we just expect topic positions to offer linkages looking back and then context too right so the beginning of the sentence helps us ground what we're uh readers and then the new information comes at the end this is actually referred to in linguistics as the known new contract right we start with what's known and then we build on what's new and here's one more paragraph this is actually the first paragraph from that article over the past two decades the growing charter school movement and widespread adoption of the internet has brought about a unique confluence of policies and technologies in education the result of this convergence is a relatively new form of public school the cyber charter school which offers both new possibilities for the delivery of education and rise in controversies that put pressure on existing education policies a ccs is a public institution that is guided by a charter and offers a tuition-free education option virtual charter schools are unique because they deliver education programs over the internet cyber charters arise from the serendipitous combination of school choice policies and the widespread adoption of technology and if we look at how that those sentences are put together we can see that all right so over the past two decades there's the kind of um positioning but the main idea right the growing charter school movement and widespread adoption of the internet like we kind of know those from the title and just from knowing things right we know that the adoption of the internet is growing and we know that this is going to be about charters and then the new information has brought a unique confluence of policies and technologies in education and then we see what happens in the next sentence is that what's in green there the new information from one sentence becomes familiar and known information in the next one right so the result of this convergence right is now is part of that is connected to what came before it it's the connection it's the it's now known it was new at the end and now it's become known and then we get new information in the rest of the sentence and we see that that happens throughout the paragraph right so then what's in green here becomes he's talking about the ccs the cyber charter school giving us details about it the next sentence starts with well a ccs that's now familiar information and then we get new information at the end of that sentence and the next sentence again cyber charters repeats that known information and gives us new information so that's a way to help create connection throughout a paragraph um it's actually even a good heuristic for creating a paragraph like if you're stuck and you think okay i have my main top my you know my first sentence how do i start to build on that like if you're stuck it's actually a good like okay here's what i know here's one piece of information here's the new thing i'm adding now that's my connection now what am i adding what am i adding what am i adding so that's a way to again feed into reader expectations we expect it gets what's known and then what's new and i lied and there's one last less dramatic one and that's the another thing that we often um also help our readers by giving them some kind of meta discourse right talk about the talk so things like over the past decades or in this one um yes like for example furthermore those kinds of things count as meta discourse right they're the kind of connections um that help us help readers follow things and um those of you that write in fields that have headings and subheadings that's a kind of meta discourse right that's the kind of helping it's not content it's about the content that's there and it's helping your reader follow along usually the longer the text the more metadiscourse we get often the more complex the material the more we want to kind of leave a way to explain how to read through it whether that's through headings and subheadings or something else it's common at the beginning and ends of subjects or sections and chapters it can be superfluous right it's probably things that you someone along the line told you to get out of your writing in my opinion i would like to take this opportunity to blah blah blah those things that you don't necessarily need to say but it can also be a guide so you don't want to say the superfluous things but you do want to say that for example furthermore although um so that can help guide the reader and we actually see it this is the more of the article the interview article we can see the way that she used that in addressing the goals in addition finally from this in an effort organized around those kind of things that aren't part of the content but help us understand and follow the information questions about any of that okay we're gonna go ahead and get started on the library research portion um so you may think this is a little bit out of order right writing goes first and then you look at look for resources um but the writing portion and the research portion are so interrelated that every time we do this we're like so who should go first today should you go first should i go first um so the point is is that you're frequently writing while you're researching and researching while you're writing so you have to kind of keep both in the back your mind while you're you're doing this exercise um so i am kelsey corlett rivera i'm the head of the research commons so i organize a lot of programming and sort res services for graduate students and faculty around campus so i'm going to point out a few of our library resources that are specific to graduate students and some of your most important resources before we get into doing some searches and seeing how to really make sure that you're searching is comprehensive when you're working on a literature review okay so this is the library homepage it's lib.umd.edu this is a great place to start your research if you aren't already doing so um so if you are one of those people who are still in a book field they do still exist we have many books you probably saw some on your way in today um the best place to get started is with this search box on the homepage this takes you into world cat which is our catalog but also we'll link you to materials at other institutions that we can then request you'll also notice this tab right here that says databases so this is the place to access most of our online resources like journal articles that are included in various subject-specific databases okay so if you already know your favorite um say like psycinfo my personal favorite is the mla international bibliography i'm a foreign language literature scholar so if you have a favorite database you can type the title in right there or you can browse by subject browse by subject category so you have access to all of this material from home off campus once you get into the list of databases let's say we're working on public health today apparently public health does not show up i should have thought of that before i stood up in front of a group let's say animal science for the fun of things um when you click this title right here to get into the agricola database if you are off campus it will ask you to log in with your directory id and password okay so that's how that works otherwise your functionality will be the same as if you were sitting right here in this room today okay um so those are some very basic things i also want to emphasize some of our human resources right we have a large number of services but we have some very um helpful humans that work in the library as well so you'll find them all over um the first floor anytime you have a question you can head to the library services desk the folks there can get you in touch with the resources that you need they're open all the time right we're 24 7 for a significant portion of the semester we also have subject librarians who are much more familiar with your particular discipline and especially if you're working on a dissertation master's thesis some sort of large writing project research project i highly recommend scheduling a consultation with that so the best way to get in touch with one of them if you you can actually find them in a multitude of ways but if you are looking for help you can meet your subject specialist and this gives you a little bit of information about the type of help that they can provide and then you can get into our directory so you can look by your subject so if you're in aerospace engineering my colleague elizabeth sorgel is your librarian if you click on her name you can see her lovely face helps you recognize her if you're scheduling a meeting with her gives you a little bit more information about her and then all of us now have this schedule a consultation button so you can go ahead and click that button and op pups a live schedule with her availability in there so you can see exactly when she would be available to meet with you book an appointment online meet her at her office over in the engineering and physical sciences library okay so it's really easy to book an appointment with us i'm in here for foreign languages if that's your field and i highly recommend getting in touch with your librarian at some point it can really help you make sure you're you're looking in the appropriate places and being as comprehensive as you need to be okay so um you can find that under help also under about or on the research commons page so most of you if you go under ima on the drop down menu these menus are a little touchy i know i'm going to get it there we go if you click on ima researcher you end up on the research commons home page okay and here you can see some of the services that i've mentioned the spaces that are available to you the subject specialist and then also events like the one you're attending today okay so this is a great place to go for library information and then also the events that are taking place here that are specific to researchers on campus okay does anybody have any questions about the library homepage some of our services anything like that is a handout in the back that has um some great information about how to request our materials and also some pro tips for getting your requests through as quickly as possible okay so definitely grab one of those if you haven't yet and there's some links on there that will help you get to the places you need to be okay all right so um you guys are all here for literature review purposes right linda has given you a very good overview of why we do literature reviews how you can structure them how you can organize them but you do have to have the actual literature at the base of them right um so since you all are from so many different disciplines we're gonna stick with google scholar for today as opposed to heading into psycinfo or agricola or some of the other databases that we just looked at how many of you guys use google scholar on a regular basis excellent it's a great resource and how many of you have it set up so that it recognizes you as a university of maryland person and will give you access a couple all right um so i highly recommend creating a google scholar profile if you haven't yet um you can verify yourself as being a umd affiliate put in all your information um you're seeing my uh publications right now but the other thing that this will do for you is that it will give you current awareness services right so it'll help you keep up with new research that's coming out around your publications you can also save searches in google scholar and then get notifications when new things pop up in those searches okay so um if we go to my google scholar page um my updates so you can see these are a list of articles that have come out around my research interests so i highly recommend going in and doing that while you're at it i believe it's over here under settings you can choose your library links okay so once you're in google scholar you can see that i am with the university of maryland libraries and it will go ahead and link into our proxy server so you can get access to articles automatically with your directorate and password okay so um we're heading back to google scholar this is the home page um so i also have up over here in a different tab zotero how many of you have heard of zotero just a few okay so zotero is a citation management system similar to endnote endnote web mendeley or some others you may have heard of there's another handout in the back that offers sort of a comparison of these different systems i'm a die-hard zotero fan it's open source you can keep it forever you don't have to worry about it being tied to your institution it's got pretty much every style that you could ever want it to for any journal out there since people are out developing the styles as we speak um and also keeps it up to date when say a new issue of a particular style manual is published so um i'm keeping zotero open because it's really useful to have it while you are looking for your articles so you can keep things organized so before i even start doing any searching i'm going to go ahead and create a new folder for today and we're going to say this is my actually i'm going to call it something else this is going to be my health informatics lit review okay so i have a new folder i don't haven't put anything in it yet um and i realized that zotero has just magically appeared on my machine but i'll take a little bit of time at the end if we have any and i can walk people through it's very specific to your machine whether you have a mac or windows or you're working in firefox or you're using the standalone version um so i won't try and troubleshoot for the entire group at once okay so we're back to google scholar um as i mentioned we're going to work on health informatics today all right so this is a pretty general search if i were really doing my lit review i'd have a nice solid research question that i would be basing this on but for now it's a broad topic of health informatics and i'm seeing what's out there okay so i'm gonna do my search of course i get a million results because it's google right um so we're not going to look at all million today um you can see that a lot of the full text versions are over here on the right but you also see this little find at umd link that pops up so that's the bit that will look through our databases and see if we have access to the full text of this um so yeah so you see it showing up at a few different places you may notice that some of these edu addresses are the pre-print version of the article and we may be able to get you access to the post publication version through our databases so um for the purposes of our project today we're going to take a look at the first one this is an article called consumer health informatics okay so it was published in the british medical journal in 2000 we have the abstract right here but we're running into a problem it doesn't show the full text right here um and it wants you to pay for it should you ever pay for an article no good job all right that is part of the reason why the library exists right we spend an awful lot of money on subscriptions to journals so that our researchers have access to their content okay so if you ever run into a screen like this where it says oh you have to sign in you have to do this you have to pay 75 you don't have to do that okay so we're going to backtrack because we don't want to do that and we're going to try this link over here if it were you know find at umd we'd do that instead and we will make sure okay so we now have full text access through a different venue okay so my point is never pay for an article and if you're really having a hard time tracking down something email your subject librarian and say look i can't find this so um there's always a better way okay so we have this article um so we're gonna say that this is a seminal article in our field all right so this is one article that we absolutely know we need to include in our literature review so we want to see where it got its information from okay so the sources that it has cited so going back in the past but we'd also like to see the sources that it that have cited this paper since it came out right so taking their little time machine and going forward it was published in 2000 i'm i'm sure that a lot of progress has been made on health informatics since 2000 okay so the first step is going back in the past and that's pretty straightforward right so we scroll down to the end of our article and we take a look at the citations that have been included there okay so whenever you find a really solid article one way to ensure that you're being comprehensive is to follow up on the sources that have been cited they're in so i chose somewhat randomly for the purposes of today's demonstration but let's say that we're looking for this article by a coulter paternalism or partnership patients have grown up and there's no going back i'm going to copy the title and the author at some point i'm very hopeful that all of these will just be magically linked from every bibliography that exists in the world but until then we still have to do a little bit of searching to get to the full text all right so i'll go ahead and copy that i'm going to head back to google scholar and i'm going to do a search for this one okay there we are all right so i'm gonna go ahead and um show you guys how the find at umd works so if we click this link okay it's going to let us know the ways that we can access the full text so right here we say we have two different options that are in the british medical journal one is from the publisher website the other is from jstor either of them will get you the full text right so you click this link right here if we were off campus we'd log in with our director id and password and here we have the full article okay so we have the full text version on this side or we could click and get the pdf all right so we're working on our lit review we've followed up in the past i want to make sure that i add this to my zotero so i have this lovely little icon up here in the toolbar that looks like a little page i'm going to go ahead and save this it tells me it's saving to my health informatic lit review folder so if we go over here okay so we now have the article with all of the citation information and actually the full text pdf right there all right so as you're doing your searching you can store your pdfs keep track of things you can also add notes so if we want to say where's the article right this is so this is a this is a british article i mean i know it's the british medical journal but it's about the nhs um which is specific to britain so maybe we could say something like uh the british perspective and all of these notes become searchable okay so you can if you remember that you you said british perspective at some point you could search for it and then find that article that way as well um so i will go ahead and go back over here to info okay all right so we have all the information that we need to get back to that um i am going to go ahead and go back to our original search okay so this is our original source um we said that we also wanted to go forward in time right so we want to see all of the things that have cited this particular source now google scholar very helpfully includes this cited by link other databases do as well so keep an eye out for something like cited by um anything that sounds like that and you can see the sources that have then cited this one that we're looking at at the moment i feel like i always butcher the way that i say this because i'm talking in both directions but hopefully you guys are staying with me when we're going forward and backward okay so this is everything that has cited that particular article now our point in looking forward in the future from our original source was to see more recent things so i kind of want to get rid of these 2002 results over here so i'm going to go ahead and limit to since 2015. we're getting a little bit further into 2016 that might do the trick um so this is everything that cited that article since 2015. and i'm going to go ahead and take a look at this one about consumer health informatics we'll take a quick look at it so first of all we're not going to buy the chapter um what is this that i'm looking at okay so it looks like a textbook right so this particular part right here consumer health informatics is a chapter within that book so this is a chapter of an ebook looks very much like your standard journal article when you click on it you figure out what it is that you're dealing with so i point this out because it may inform what you want to get right because it could be that you just need this little chapter in which case you can submit a request for a single chapter or maybe you really do want the full clinical informatics study guide and you could request the entire book okay so it depends on on you want to sort of think through what would be useful for you of course getting a single chapter is going to be faster than if you were to request an entire copy of the book okay and i realized that i sort of jumped forward a little bit because i said request so in this case there was no find it option right um if we go back and look over here we didn't have any way to get access to this through the university um so that means that we would go ahead and submit an interlibrary loan request so how many of you have requested something from interlibrary loan just a few okay i highly recommend it guys it's free you get uh scanned versions of book chapters and articles within three business days um you can if you're getting something that's from another um big ten institution you can get a full book in about a week and keep it for four months so definitely take advantage of that resource um so i'll show you sort of how to get there for this um i of course already requested this for from interlibrary loan so we could show you how it works but right here on the the home page you can go to interlibrary loan and you borrow you can see our different options for getting to things in this case i'm going to choose classic interlibrary loan it makes you log in with your well it tells you a little bit about it we have about 47 links between the home page and actually logging into your ill account sorry about that so classic interlibrary loan asks you to log in with your director id and password you can request an article or other copy and then in two to three business days you get an email that says lo and behold your article is here so i requested this on friday afternoon and i got it hours later right so my two to three business days doesn't oh it doesn't always take that long so i have all the information about what i requested i have two weeks from today to download it and of course i just got to that page let's see if i can remember my password in front of a large success okay so now i have a pdf of this particular chapter okay so i'm going to download it because i want to put it into my zotero okay so we have our little wait sorry there it is okay so that's the chapter that we're looking at i'm going to add it to my zotero it's going to tell me that there's no full text pdf available so when i go over here to zotero minimize that there's the book chapter that we're looking at i can add an attachment and i will go ahead and grab that pdf that i just downloaded okay so now i have everything in one place again i don't have to remember to go back to my ill account i don't have to worry about you know not going in there for two weeks and then the file having disappeared i keep it all together in one spot okay so we went back in time we went forward in time and we kept track of everything in zotero while we were doing it okay um so the question is well now what do we do with all this stuff right like it's great to have an ongoing bibliography it's great to have all your research in one place you can see i have about a gajillion different folders here on the left including all of my stuff from back in grad school so it's really great to have that historical record of what you've been working on you don't have to recreate searches you don't have to think what database was i in when i found that particular article it's all just in one place and then when you're doing your writing and you're going through and you're saying this is the best lit review ever clearly and we say okay um our first paper [Music] uh touches on paternalism we want to cite that so i've already installed the zotero plugin for this um i'm going to go ahead and add a citation for it we're going to say we're using apa for today you can leave everything else defaults and i remember that it was by that coulter person it pulls in for the parenthetical citation if you click on it you can actually put the page number while you found your quote so this will be 76 i've decided you hit enter and now you have a parenthetical citation okay it also works with footnotes um and then when you get all done and you want to finish your bibliography you say insert bibliography and it does a citation for you of whatever you've cited so far in the paper yes ah it okay so if you're using latex it does work and this is one of the advantage of using an open source platform that people are always adding to is that they they make accommodations for systems like latex so if you google i google a lot librarians love google um so and zotero right so it will explain how you can set all that stuff up um so the other great thing is let's say that you're writing for a particular journal and you've used that style and then bummer you don't get your article accepted and you have to resubmit to a different journal that say uses chicago rather than tearing your hair out you can change your style i'm actually going to change to the full node version and let's say your journal says endnotes i will different it just does it so it saves you time in the long run as well all right so whether you end up choosing zotero or mendeley or papers or whatever it is that that works for you you know if you're in web of science 24 7 then maybe you want to think about endnote um they interface very well together but you want to use something because it keeps everything in one place you can write notes you can stay organized and that means that when you're working on your literature review and you need to know which study you know use this type of methodology and organize it that way you have all of that information right there in zotero you've used your notes and it really is a great way to stay organized and to do proper citations at the end of it

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Id: FF3Cyjo1ZCQ

Length: 94min 41sec (5681 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017