Information Conventions

It goes without saying that nearly all research builds on previous research.Researchers commonly begin a project by studying past work in the area and deriving relevant information and ideas from their predecessors. This process is largely responsible for the continual expansion of human knowledge. Stage II is often presented as an organized collection of references or citations to other works which are listed in a section at the end of your report.

According toWeissberg & Buker (1990), the review of literature serves three important functions:

1. It continues the process started in Stage I of giving your readers background information needed to understand your study;

2. It assures your readers that you are familiar with the important research that has been carried out in your area;

3. It establishes your study as one link in a chain of research that is developing and enlarging knowledge in your field.

Searching and reading, of course, are time consuming, but after you have read one or two articles in your field and have developed a sense of the relative importance of the various published papers, you can read selectively. In the ultimate sense, reading the articles in your field becomes insurance against writing a naive manuscript.

Literature references should not be tackled onto a manuscript as a perfunctory aid to the reader. Instead, they need to be used with taste and judgment. An author must remember that the literature on any subject grows rapidly each year and that readers become swamped with the publications in their specialty. For these reasons, it is increasingly important for an author to be definitive in citing sources.

The writer of the literature review may cite other authors in two different ways. He may choose to focus either on the (1) information provided by the author or (2) on the author himself or herself. The first focus we call information prominent because the information is given primary importance. In this case the author’s name and date of the publication are parenthetically attached at the end of the sentence. Below examples of information prominent citations and the way of documenting them are given:

Examples.

The literature on teaching effectiveness has established few theoretical grounds to guide the selection of meaningful variables. (Doyle, 1978)

Attention research using various forms of nonface static and dynamic visual displays has been a consistent focus of cognitive psychologists since the 1950s. (Thompson, 2004)

Information prominent citations are commonly used to signal the beginning ofStage II, where the citations refer to research in the general area of your study.

As the literature review continues, the citations refer to studies more closely related to your own. In this kind of citation, the author’s name is given more emphasis. This kind of citation is called author prominent. Below examples of author prominent citations and the ways of documenting them are given:

Examples.

Mayers (1987) replicated Keenan et. al’s (1984) study under more controlled conditions and found the same results.

Brainerd (2001) found that male suicide rates were strongly related to the state of the microeconomic situation.

There are different ways of arranging citations in the literature review section. It is possible to arrange them in order from those most distantly related to your study to those most closely related. In addition, there are other ways to order your citations. For example, in a literature review describing the history of research in your area, you may arrange your citations in chronological order. Or, if you have a large number of citations to include in your literature review, as in a thesis or dissertation, you can group them according to the different approaches to the research problem taken by different authors. The citations within each group can then be ordered chronologically or from general to specific. Figure 1 shows in a graphic form three ways of ordering citations.

Citations grouped by approach     +     +

or or

Citations ordered chronologically   (earliest) ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ (latest)

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 951