"Research means that you don’t know, but are willing to find out."
-Charles F. Ketterling
The foundation of every field of study within communication begins with academic research and systematic inquiry. The principles and best practices followed in communication career fields are dictated by this scholarly research, so learning how to make sense of research can help you apply what you’ve learned in a professional setting. Communication research, no matter what discipline (journalism, public relations, media and entertainment, or organizational and professional communication), requires above average skills in written communication and critical thinking. Regardless of the field in which you work, as a communication professional you will have to learn to be flexible and adaptable. You will write in various voices, contexts, and formats. Think of this class as an addition to your skill set or toolbox.
When we set out to determine the “state of the art” in our field, where do we begin? As communication scholars, we start by gathering academic research and then we try to make sense of it. This academic literature can be found in scholarly books and journals; our job is to locate and read through this literature to look for recurring themes, find the latest data, and identify any missing pieces. As we read and re-read the literature, these themes, data, and “holes” in the research emerge. Once we’re confident in our analysis of the existing literature, we write a paper called a Literature Review, which organizes the research in such a way that tells a story about the topic we’re studying. It’s a handy guide to your particular topic. This is always the first step in scholarly communication research.
Your literature review should summarize the publications you’ve read, but it is not the same as an annotated bibliography. If you have ever been assigned an annotated bibliography, you know that it is simply an alphabetical list of publications you’ve read and a short recap of what each publication was about. The annotated bibliography gives your instructor an idea of the accuracy, relevance, and quality of the sources you found. The literature review is more in-depth and is written like an essay, organized around ideas and not the sources themselves. You won’t simply list your sources and give some detail about each one, one at a time.
In the literature review, you give an overview of your topic, you summarize and evaluate your academic sources, and you determine what is important. Rather than presenting your summaries in a bibliography, the literature review tells a story, where each summary transitions into the next in a logical manner. You analyze the arguments made in the literature you’ve read, looking for consistent findings across these publications, and pointing out any inconsistencies. How does each author’s insights on your topic differ from or conform to previous arguments? Once you’ve analyzed your literature, do you see something missing? Are there any irregularities? A good literature review discusses all of these. See Figure 1 for a comparison of the literature review to the annotated bibliography.
A literature review can be a stand-alone work (often called a “review article”) or it can be one part of a larger research paper. The main focus of a literature review is to summarize and synthesize other authors’ arguments and ideas (without adding new contributions), and often this can stand alone as an assignment or paper. It can give a great overview of a topic. For communication professionals, such papers help them keep up with what’s current in the field. Research papers, however, are larger undertakings. Since the main focus of a research paper is to develop a new argument on your topic, such a paper will contain a literature review to offer a foundation or support for the research topic. When students do their own original research studies (for a capstone paper, thesis, or dissertation), they first write the literature review before proposing their own research questions, designing a methodology, and carrying out their own research (perhaps a survey, focus group, or content analysis). Literature reviews are crucial to the foundation of a larger research study.
Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): Comparing the Annotated Bibliography to the Literature Review (Buttram, MacMillan, & Koch, 2012)
References
Buttram, C., MacMillan III, D., & Koch Jr., R. T. (2012). Comparing the annotated bibliography to the literature review. UNA Center for Writing Excellence. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/gn8apar
