2.3.1: Research Literature

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the importance of a literature review is for any research study.
2. Provide examples of sources that are part of the research literature and sources that are not.

You may have many questions about the world and human behavior, but how do you go about testing them? The scientific method model (Figure 2.3.1) doesn't really have a starting point since it's circular, but a good starting point is to take any question you have about human behavior, and then use previous research to help define your terms and make predictions. Finding and reading previous research on your topic is called a literature review.

A later chapter will go more in-depth about conducting a literature review, and will provide suggestions for reading these technical articles. For now, you are just tipping your toe into the waters of research literature to understand its place in the scientific method.

Literature Review Overview

Research literature in any field is all the published research in that field. Reviewing the research literature means finding, reading, and summarizing the published research relevant to your topic of interest. Reviewing the literature early in the research process can help you in several other ways.

• It can tell you if a research question has already been answered.
• It can help you evaluate the interestingness of a research question.
• It can give you ideas for how to conduct your own study.
• It can tell you how your study fits into the research literature.

The academic literature in any discipline is enormous—including millions of scholarly articles, essays, and books dating to the beginning of the field—and it continues to grow. Most of what you will read will be from professional journals. There are thousands of professional journals that publish research in social science fields. They are usually published monthly or quarterly in individual issues, each of which contains several articles. The issues are organized into volumes, which usually consist of all the issues for a calendar year. Some journals are published in hard copy only, others in both hard copy and electronic form, and still others in electronic form only. Most articles in professional journals are one of two basic types: empirical research reports (sometimes called primary sources) and review articles (which are a type of secondary sources). Let's start with these empirical studies.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Small Sample of the Thousands of Professional Journals That Publish Research in Psychology and Related Fields

Covers of psychology journals.

Most professional journals in psychology undergo a process of peer review. Researchers who want to publish their work in the journal submit a manuscript to the editor—who is generally an established researcher too—who in turn sends it to two or three experts on the topic. Each reviewer reads the manuscript, writes a critical but constructive review, and sends the review back to the editor along with recommendations about whether the manuscript should be published or not. The editor then decides whether to accept the article for publication, ask the authors to make changes and resubmit it for further consideration, or reject it outright. In any case, the editor forwards the reviewers’ written comments to the researchers so that they can revise their manuscript accordingly. This entire process is double-blind, as the reviewers do not know the identity of the researcher(s) and vice versa. Double-blind peer review is helpful because it ensures that the work meets basic standards of the field before it can enter the research literature. However, in order to increase transparency and accountability, some newer open access journals (e.g., Frontiers in Psychology) utilize an open peer review process wherein the identities of the reviewers (which remain concealed during the peer review process) are published alongside the journal article.

Empirical Research Articles

When you conduct a literature review, you'll focus on articles in professional journals that describe studies in which the authors of article collected and analyzed data. These are sometimes called empirical research reports or primary sources. They are empirical because data is collected, and they are primary because the article authors collected the data. If you are reading an article and it doesn't describe the methods of data collection, especially the number of participants, then you are probably not reading an empirical article.

Other Academic Literature

As described above, empirical research reports describe one or more new empirical studies conducted by the authors. Empirical research reports introduce a research question, explain why it is interesting, review previous research, describe their method and results, and draw their conclusions. But empirical research articles aren't the only academic literature that can help you develop your research study. Review articles and scholarly books provide summaries of research. This may save you time on reading every single research article on the topic, as well as help you narrow your focus and find the right terminology.

What can be confusing is that other types of academic literature, like review articles, are also published in professional journals. Empirical research reports are where you'll learn about individual studies and their results, while review articles summarize previously published research on a topic and usually present new ways to organize or explain the results. When a review article is devoted primarily to presenting a new theory, it is often referred to as a theoretical article. Review articles are considered secondary sources, in comparison to the primary source of empirical research articles. When a review article provides a statistical summary of all of the previous results it is referred to as a meta-analysis. These types of articles are sometimes considered primary sources because the authors choose the articles and (re-)analyze the data, but they could also be considered secondary sources because they did not collect their own data.

Scholarly books are books written by researchers and practitioners mainly for use by other researchers and practitioners. A monograph is written by a single author or a small group of authors and usually, gives a coherent presentation of a topic much like an extended review article. Edited volumes have an editor or a small group of editors who recruit many authors to write separate chapters on different aspects of the same topic. Although edited volumes can also give a coherent presentation of the topic, it is not unusual for each chapter to take a different perspective or even for the authors of different chapters to openly disagree with each other. In general, scholarly books undergo a peer review process similar to that used by professional journals.

Non-Academic Literature

There are other writings that you may find useful, especially when you are first starting to research a topic. Its boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, but academic literature definitely does not include dictionary, websites, non-academic books, and similar sources that are intended mainly for the general public. These are considered unreliable because they are not reviewed by other researchers and are often not based on empirical research studies. Wikipedia contains much valuable information, but because its authors are anonymous and may not have any formal training or expertise in that subject area, and its content continually changes it is unsuitable as a basis of sound scientific research. These readings can provide background and help you determine a good research question, but they should quickly be abandoned when starting on academic research.

Research Literature to Research Question

Hopefully you have a sense that reading academic research, especially empirical research reports, will provide a background as you begin your own academic research. This background knowledge will help lead you to develop research questions. Review the video from the University Libraries at North Carolina State University to see how you must use previous research to tweak your research question to something that you can find academic research on and still answer your research question (University Libraries, 2013).

 

References

Universities Libraries. (2013, August 1). Picking your topic of research! North Carolina State University. https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/videos/pick...ic-is-research