What Research Method Is Based on Literature Comparison and Review
Affiliate 2: Getting Started in Enquiry
Reviewing the Research Literature
- Define the enquiry literature in psychology and give examples of sources that are part of the inquiry literature and sources that are non.
- Describe and use several methods for finding previous inquiry on a particular inquiry idea or question.
Reviewing the enquiry literature means finding, reading, and summarizing the published inquiry relevant to your question. An empirical research study written in American Psychological Association (APA) manner always includes a written literature review, but it is of import to review the literature early in the research process for several reasons.
- It can help you turn a research idea into an interesting inquiry question.
- It can tell y'all if a inquiry question has already been answered.
- Information technology can help you evaluate the interestingness of a research question.
- It can give yous ideas for how to conduct your own study.
- Information technology can tell you how your study fits into the research literature.
What Is the Inquiry Literature?
The in whatsoever field is all the published enquiry in that field. The research literature in psychology is enormous—including millions of scholarly articles and books dating to the showtime of the field—and it continues to grow. Although its boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, the research literature definitely does not include self-aid and other pop psychology books, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, websites, and like sources that are intended mainly for the general public. These are considered unreliable because they are not reviewed past other researchers and are often based on little more than common sense or personal feel. Wikipedia contains much valuable information, simply the fact that its authors are bearding and may non have whatsoever formal training or expertise in that subject field area, and its content continually changes makes information technology unsuitable as a footing of audio scientific research. For our purposes, it helps to define the research literature every bit consisting almost entirely of two types of sources: articles in professional journals, and scholarly books in psychology and related fields.
Professional person Journals
are periodicals that publish original research articles. There are thousands of professional person journals that publish research in psychology and related fields. They are ordinarily published monthly or quarterly in private problems, each of which contains several manufactures. The issues are organized into volumes, which unremarkably consist of all the problems for a calendar year. Some journals are published in hard copy only, others in both hard copy and electronic form, and nevertheless others in electronic form only.
Virtually articles in professional journals are 1 of 2 bones types: empirical research reports and review articles. depict one or more new empirical studies conducted past the authors. They innovate a research question, explain why it is interesting, review previous enquiry, describe their method and results, and draw their conclusions. summarize previously published research on a topic and ordinarily present new ways to organize or explain the results. When a review commodity is devoted primarily to presenting a new theory, information technology is often referred to as a .
Most professional person journals in psychology undergo a process ofdouble-blind peer review. Researchers who want to publish their piece of work in the journal submit a manuscript to the editor—who is generally an established researcher as well—who in plough sends it to two or three experts on the topic. Each reviewer reads the manuscript, writes a critical just constructive review, and sends the review back to the editor forth with his or her recommendations. The editor and so decides whether to accept the article for publication, ask the authors to make changes and resubmit it for further consideration, or pass up it outright. In any case, the editor forwards the reviewers' written comments to the researchers and so that they can revise their manuscript accordingly. This entire process is double-bullheaded, 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 inquiry literature. However, in order to increment transparency and accountability some newer open access journals (eastward.g., Frontiers in Psychology) utilize an open up peer review process wherein the identities of the reviewers (which remain curtained during the peer review process) are published aslope the periodical article.
Scholarly Books
are books written by researchers and practitioners mainly for utilise by other researchers and practitioners. A is written past a single author or a modest group of authors and usually gives a coherent presentation of a topic much like an extended review article. take an editor or a small grouping of editors who recruit many authors to write separate chapters on different aspects of the same topic. Although edited volumes tin also requite a coherent presentation of the topic, information technology is non unusual for each chapter to accept a different perspective or even for the authors of unlike chapters to openly disagree with each other. In general, scholarly books undergo a peer review process similar to that used by professional person journals.
Literature Search Strategies
Using PsycINFO and Other Databases
The primary method used to search the research literature involves using one or more electronic databases. These include Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, and ProQuest for all bookish disciplines, ERIC for education, and PubMed for medicine and related fields. The most important for our purposes, however, is PsycINFO, which is produced by the APA. is so comprehensive—covering thousands of professional person journals and scholarly books going back more than 100 years—that for most purposes its content is synonymous with the research literature in psychology. Like virtually such databases, PsycINFO is usually bachelor through your university library.
PsycINFO consists of individual records for each article, book affiliate, or book in the database. Each record includes basic publication data, an abstruse or summary of the work (similar the one presented at the showtime of this chapter), and a list of other works cited by that piece of work. A calculator interface allows entering one or more search terms and returns any records that comprise those search terms. (These interfaces are provided past unlike vendors and therefore can look somewhat different depending on the library you lot use.) Each record also contains lists of keywords that describe the content of the piece of work and too a list of alphabetize terms. The index terms are specially helpful because they are standardized. Inquiry on differences betwixt women and men, for example, is ever indexed under "Human Sex activity Differences." Inquiry on notetaking is always indexed under the term "Learning Strategies." If you exercise not know the advisable index terms, PsycINFO includes a thesaurus that can help you lot find them.
Given that at that place are nigh four one thousand thousand records in PsycINFO, you lot may accept to attempt a multifariousness of search terms in different combinations and at dissimilar levels of specificity before y'all find what y'all are looking for. Imagine, for example, that you are interested in the question of whether women and men differ in terms of their ability to call up experiences from when they were very immature. If y'all were to enter "memory for early experiences" as your search term, PsycINFO would return but six records, most of which are not particularly relevant to your question. However, if y'all were to enter the search term "memory," information technology would return 149,777 records—far too many to wait through individually. This is where the thesaurus helps. Entering "retentiveness" into the thesaurus provides several more specific index terms—one of which is "early on memories." While searching for "early memories" among the index terms returns 1,446 records—even so likewise many too expect through individually—combining it with "human sex activity differences" every bit a second search term returns 37 articles, many of which are highly relevant to the topic.
Depending on the vendor that provides the interface to PsycINFO, yous may be able to save, impress, or e-mail the relevant PsycINFO records. The records might even contain links to full-text copies of the works themselves. (PsycARTICLES is a database that provides full-text admission to manufactures in all journals published by the APA.) If not, and you desire a re-create of the piece of work, y'all will have to discover out if your library carries the periodical or has the book and the hard re-create on the library shelves. Be sure to ask a librarian if you demand assist.
Using Other Search Techniques
In add-on to inbound search terms into PsycINFO and other databases, there are several other techniques you tin can employ to search the research literature. First, if you accept one expert commodity or book chapter on your topic—a recent review article is all-time—you can wait through the reference list of that article for other relevant manufactures, books, and book chapters. In fact, yous should exercise this with whatsoever relevant article or book affiliate yous find. You tin also start with a classic article or book affiliate on your topic, find its record in PsycINFO (past entering the author'southward proper name or article's title equally a search term), and link from at that place to a list of other works in PsycINFO that cite that archetype article. This works because other researchers working on your topic are probable to exist aware of the archetype article and cite it in their own work. You tin too do a full general Internet search using search terms related to your topic or the name of a researcher who conducts research on your topic. This might lead y'all straight to works that are function of the research literature (e.g., manufactures in open up-access journals or posted on researchers' own websites). The search engine Google Scholar is particularly useful for this purpose. A general Internet search might also lead you to websites that are not part of the enquiry literature but might provide references to works that are. Finally, you can talk to people (e.g., your instructor or other kinesthesia members in psychology) who know something about your topic and can propose relevant articles and book chapters.
What to Search For
When you do a literature review, you demand to be selective. Not every article, volume chapter, and volume that relates to your inquiry thought or question volition be worth obtaining, reading, and integrating into your review. Instead, y'all want to focus on sources that help you do four basic things: (a) refine your research question, (b) identify appropriate enquiry methods, (c) place your inquiry in the context of previous enquiry, and (d) write an effective research study. Several basic principles can aid you lot discover the near useful sources.
First, information technology is best to focus on recent research, keeping in listen that what counts as contempo depends on the topic. For newer topics that are actively being studied, "contempo" might mean published in the past twelvemonth or two. For older topics that are receiving less attention correct at present, "recent" might mean within the past ten years. You lot will go a feel for what counts as contempo for your topic when y'all start your literature search. A expert full general dominion, however, is to outset with sources published in the past 5 years. The main exception to this rule would be classic articles that turn upwardly in the reference list of most every other source. If other researchers think that this piece of work is important, even though information technology is old, then past all means you should include it in your review.
Second, you lot should await for review articles on your topic because they volition provide a useful overview of it—ofttimes discussing important definitions, results, theories, trends, and controversies—giving you a good sense of where your ain research fits into the literature. Y'all should too look for empirical inquiry reports addressing your question or similar questions, which tin give you ideas about how to operationally define your variables and collect your data. As a general rule, it is skilful to utilise methods that others accept already used successfully unless you lot accept good reasons not to. Finally, you should look for sources that provide information that tin can aid y'all argue for the interestingness of your research question. For a study on the furnishings of jail cell phone apply on driving ability, for instance, y'all might look for information about how widespread cell telephone use is, how frequent and costly motor vehicle crashes are, and so on.
How many sources are enough for your literature review? This is a difficult question because it depends on how extensively your topic has been studied and as well on your ain goals. One study found that across a diverseness of professional journals in psychology, the boilerplate number of sources cited per article was about 50 (Adair & Vohra, 2003)[1]. This gives a rough idea of what professional researchers consider to exist acceptable. As a educatee, you might exist assigned a much lower minimum number of references to utilise, but the principles for selecting the most useful ones remain the same.
- The inquiry literature in psychology is all the published inquiry in psychology, consisting primarily of articles in professional journals and scholarly books.
- Early in the research process, it is important to acquit a review of the research literature on your topic to refine your inquiry question, identify appropriate research methods, place your question in the context of other enquiry, and ready to write an constructive inquiry written report.
- There are several strategies for finding previous research on your topic. Amidst the best is using PsycINFO, a computer database that catalogs millions of articles, books, and volume capacity in psychology and related fields.
- Exercise: Use the techniques discussed in this section to find ten journal articles and book capacity on 1 of the following research ideas: memory for smells, aggressive driving, the causes of narcissistic personality disorder, the functions of the intraparietal sulcus, or prejudice confronting the physically handicapped.
- Watch the following video clip produced by UBCiSchool about how to read an academic paper (without losing your mind):
Video Attributions
- "Sample PsycINFO Search on EBSCOhost" past APA Publishing Training. Standard YouTube Licence.
- "Using Google Scholar (Prune)" by clipinfolit. CC BY (Attribution)
- "How to Read an Academic Paper" by UBCiSchool. CC By (Attribution)
Source: https://opentextbc.ca/researchmethods/chapter/reviewing-the-research-literature/
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