6.4: Advanced Source Types

Now that you have conducted several searches in your topic area, you may need to find citations that fit specific criteria. If you are working on a dissertation, thesis, or publication, these will be important to your literature review. These may or may not be needed for a course assignment, depending on your instructor's parameters.

Seminal/landmark works

What are they?

These are published works that originally presented an idea, theory, model, or methodology that became influential in the field. They're sometimes called seminal (from Latin for seed), landmark, pivotal, or foundational studies.

How to find them?

Seminal works are not labeled, so you need to look for clues.

• Your faculty and textbook may explicitly mention them. For example, you likely already know some of the biggest names in your discipline. Similarly, your faculty know the biggest names within their specialized areas of research and expertise.
• References of your sources - are there authors who appear often?
• Do your sources explicitly mention authors or works as being pivotal?
  • For example, Droog et al. (2024) "Kuhlthau asserts in her seminal information search process model that feelings correlate with thoughts and actions throughout the entire research process, from uncertainty at the beginning to relief after search closure" (Droog et al., 2024). As a reader, you could immediately note that Kuhlthau is a seminal author on this particular topic.
• Check how many times a source has been cited.

If you learn that a source is pivotal - read it. Even if it is quite dated, it will likely still be worth citing. If your assignment requires only sources within the last 5-10 years, you can still cite an older source if it is pivotal. However, if your instructor stipulated that you use a certain number of sources, then all of those citations should be recent, and the pivotal work would be in addition to your required number of citations.

If you are writing a thesis, dissertation, or publication, you will definitely need to include all landmark works within the scope of your topic.

Theories

Theories (also called frameworks, models, or paradigms) are a way of giving context or explaining something: it could be a behavior, mechanism, or anything. Especially for theses and dissertations, you may be asked to incorporate theory into your literature review. How you use theories depends on the purpose of your literature review and your topic. You may be developing or questioning a theory itself; you may be using theory to justify your research; you may be using it to explain or organize what you’ve found; or you may just do a literature review of theories.

Pay attention to the sources you're already reading. What theories do they discuss?

Once you have a specific theory in mind, search the databases specifically for that theory. This tends to be a bit less straightforward than searching by topic.

Methodology

Wait, aren't we talking about literature reviews?

Yes but if you will be designing a study, you will need to justify your method and show how it has been used. It is less likely that you would need to search explicitly by methodology for a course assignment's literature review.

For a literature review, you still want to cover all the literature, not just studies using a particular methodology.

How to search

• Search for one of your broader facet terms with a methodology (e.g. affective + interviews; or "library orientation" + interviews)
• Add a filter: Some databases can limit by methodology.

Non-Peer-Reviewed Sources

If your assignment requires peer reviewed sources, then you should not use any of the following types of sources. However, if you are writing a dissertation, thesis, or publication, you might need to consider using the following types of sources.

Dissertations

Keep in mind that dissertations are scholarly, but they are not reviewed by one's peers. They are, instead, evaluations of learning so they are not assessed in a double-blind method. The evaluators are highly invested in the student's success. Therefore, while the process of doing a dissertation is rigorous, the process of evaluating them is quite different from published articles.

Dissertations are also usually quite lengthy. For both of these reasons, you might not want or even be permitted to use dissertations in course assignments. Rarely do publications cite dissertations.

If you're writing a dissertation, however, you should check others' dissertations to:

1. Avoid replicating someone else's dissertation.
2. Discovering extensive reference lists (find more sources).
3. You might be able to cite someone else's dissertation (check with your advisor if you find one that looks useful).
4. Get a sense of how other dissertations are structured or how another student designed their methodology (note that your chair might disagree with a certain design so be cautious).

Many databases will include dissertations in the search results if you do not limit to peer-reviewed sources. You can sometimes add a limit to find only dissertations. Additionally, your library might have databases of just dissertations. Likely, your university has past dissertations from its alumni accessible so you could read what others in your department wrote.

Books & book chapters

What are books?

Although books are often scholarly, they are not peer reviewed. Books are only reviewed by the book's editor.

When to use books

• Useful for theory & historical context
• Case studies can be helpful
• Even if your instructor permits scholarly works which are not peer reviewed, the majority of your resources should usually be peer reviewed articles with a smaller number (if any) of books.
• Dissertation/thesis: you will likely cite some books.

How to find books

• Most databases will include some book citations.
• You can also search for books in your library catalog.

Grey Literature & Non-Scholarly Sources

What is grey literature?

Grey Literature is something created by experts in the field, outside of traditional academic resources, such as articles and books (often called White Literature). It includes media, documents, and data, and can be written by authors or by organizations. You'll find it usually as PDFs, webpages, blogs, and multimedia. Some examples:

• Government reports and resources
• Dissertations
• NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) reports and white papers
• Blog posts from well-known expert, such as a faculty member or an advocate
• Professional associations reports
• Legal documents, including court transcriptions

When to use grey literature

Since the literature review covers previous research on your topic and grey literature is not academic research, much of it is usually not acceptable for most class assignments (unless the course specifies to look outside academic sources). However, it is often useful to cite some grey literature in your introduction, although not as often in your literature review.

Why use grey literature?

Grey literature includes statistics and data sets, which can be useful or even necessary to discuss in your introduction to demonstration the background problem.

More diverse voices are represented than within the niche of academia.

For more detailed information about grey literature, including how to find and evaluate it, check out this link for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Library Guide on Grey Literature.

Media (traditional & social media) - not scholarly!

In addition to grey literature, you might want to review media (both traditional and social media) on your topic.¹

Reviewing social and traditional media can give you a better sense of the lived experiences of people personally impacted by your topic. While it's not common to cite these in your assignments, dissertation, nor publications, by reading, listening, and watching additional voices, your lens for how you view your topic and your study will shift.

Build Supports

This can be a great time to meet with your faculty because they often have familiarity with pivotal authors, landmark studies, methodologies & theories to consider, and where to find grey literature on your topic.

It's also another great time to meet with your librarian. While they might not have the same level knowledge about your field as your faculty, they will be able to guide in searching for some of these types of sources on your own.

Next Steps

A detective might start the investigation by reviewing clues at a scene, then broaden the investigation to talk to people involved. In the same way, now that you read your sources and found patterns, let's zoom out and consider the conversation among the authors of the research.

1: Some people consider these part of grey literature because they're not peer reviewed, but can be written experts on a particular subject. Others do not consider traditional media grey literature since it's published within the commercial publishing system. For our purposes, these definitions are not important.