Although the purpose of a research project is producing new knowledge or interpretations, the process of research involves engaging with previously published material–a somewhat nebulous body of work that scholars call “the literature.” Describing where and how your work fits into the scholarly literature forms a vital part of a project because:
it helps clarify what is new about your work
it supplies a warrant for why anyone should care about this new knowledge
it means you can better talk to other people who are interested in this subject
What Is Scholarly Literature?
The phrase “scholarly literature” simultaneously sounds pretentious and lame – the sort of phrase an ascot-wearing dork would drop at a bougie cocktail party. Alternatively, the literature part could be taken to convey something rich, emotional, and beautiful–phrases that rarely describe the actual mess of PDFs and monographs that the scholarly literature actually comprises. Nevertheless, the phrase communicates two important things that students sometimes misunderstand.
The sort of phrase an ascot-wearing dork would drop
First, “scholarly” here means that a publication has been vetted by a community of people who have a stake in the topic at hand. “Scholarly” has very little to do with the fancy titles of the people who write academic research. Indeed, a Ph.D. isn’t required to publish a paper in a journal! Instead, “scholarly,” here, merely means “vetted.” A scholarly work is one that conforms to the standards of a scholarly discipline, and, often, has passed through the winding and laborious process of peer-review.
As non-experts, students often don’t have the tools to discern what “counts” as a scholarly journal. A good rule of thumb involves articles or books published from legitimate publishers or presses. Scholars sometimes bicker about the prestige associated with these venues, but for the purposes of student research such insider debates are mostly irrelevant. For now, we want to help you understand why peer review – for all its faults – is a modest signal of quality.
Why Peer Review Matters
Peer review is an acceptable form of gatekeeping. It does not mean that a given piece of scholarship is “correct” in the sense that what it says is “true” (or even fact-checked!). Instead, peer review supplies a minimum threshold that academics must overcome to share their work with their colleagues with the imprimatur of a journal. Reviewers vet how research approaches the published record on a topic and check for whether the analysis (empirical or otherwise) is not only plausible but conforms to the standards of the research’s disciplinary tradition.
The process of peer review, by the way, is relatively simple. In its easiest form, the process begins when a researcher submits a manuscript to a journal’s editor. The core function of an editor is to select reviewers and weigh their recommendations about a manuscript. The manuscript will be sent to two (sometimes three) reviewers in the field who will read the manuscript and return reports about its quality. These can include a recommendation about whether to publish, revise, or reject the manuscript, as well as a list of suggestions about how the manuscript should be improved.
If the researcher is invited to resubmit a revised manuscript, the revised manuscript will be accompanied by a (sometimes quite lengthy!) memorandum explaining what has been changed (or not) and why in response to reviewers’ comments. If the paper is rejected, then the researcher will likely incorporate at least some of these suggestions before submitting to a new journal. In either event, peer review means that other researchers will weigh in on, make suggestions about, and finally evaluate the research in light of what they know about the field and the world.
This process can be tedious and annoying for researchers, but in general it means that papers are improved before publication and also that what is published has met a minimum quality threshold. That’s a big difference from sources and publications that are less vetted.
That’s why we recommend–often, insist!--that students use only or primarily peer-reviewed sources (or other scholarly sources that have been through another type of review process). (Although we’ve mostly focused on journal articles in this discussion, most books published by university presses or similarly reputable publishers will go through a similar process.)
What you find will be less dominated by cranks, zealots, bots, and fools
That’s a big difference compared to the path of least resistance. Too often, students look for whatever low hanging fruit they can find on Google to supply their papers with material. Instead, a better approach is to crack open Google Scholar to search for material that has undergone peer review. This isn’t perfect but it will mean that what you find will be less dominated by cranks, zealots, shills, bots, and fools (certainly compared to the wilds of the Internet).
We’ll cover how we approach teaching the procedural task of finding this research at a later date. For now, we would simply note that using this tool allows students to identify the articles and books – the scholarly literature – on which they ought to build their own independent research.
Joining a Research Tradition
The second portion of this phrase – “literature” – is important in its own right. Original research does not happen in a vacuum. A research tradition doesn’t involve a one-off single but an accumulation of the wisdom of people who have spent time working through a topic thoroughly. As students play in the Google scholar sandbox, they will spend some time doing what slows down (and enriches) every project: reading widely on a topic. That can take a while, but it will usually show how your intriguing but harebrained research idea could be refined to fit within a broader record of what a community of scholars has thought and found about an issue. In a sense, reading the literature is a step in being initiated into a community.
Let’s pause here to acknowledge that just because something is accepted by a community of scholars or published in a peer-reviewed journal doesn’t make it right. The history of science is replete with ideas that once had all the trappings of authority but were nevertheless wrong–like geology before the theory of plate tectonics. Ideas, however, exist and are supported by a community, and that means understanding the practices and social norms of a community is a key part of what it means to do science–even if the inherent conservatism of such an edifice means that new ideas might face more opposition than they sometimes deserve.
The takeaway: identifying “good” research begins by recognizing that single pieces of published, peer-reviewed scholarship are best understood as part of a lineage of scholarly work. Simply finding one or a handful of such papers or books will give students a rough snapshot of the sandbox in which they are playing, but only by reading widely and deeply will they understand the contours and nuances of the task at hand.
The practical: Don’t use Google. Use Google Scholar or other scholarly search tools to find material that’s high quality and vetted.