Understanding Research (19 page)

The web itself (viz. the internet) is in many ways one big library, globally linked clusters of electronic databases connected by what is known as
browser
software; more recently in the form of the ubiquitous
search engine
. This sort of online resource is currently dominated by the registered trademark Google and its derivates like Google Scholar amidst an array of others designed for different needs and with different implications for the search results.

To complicate matters, all of these newer digital and ICT-embedded resources are changing all the time, as are their trade names and compatibility with older machines, university and public libraries’ ability to keep up with the play, and more informal conventions of passing on knowledge of key literature. In the latter sense, its well worth the effort of following up on any recommendation, from anyone. You never know what gems you may find that you could have missed whilst trying to find the needle in the virtual haystack that is the web of today.
Chapter 5
looks in more detail at how to use the web as a resource and tool for undertaking a literature search. This section deals with the underlying principles.

These days many students starting out on a research project assume that the web and other sorts of electronic databases or digital books and articles are the first port of call. Increasingly the journey (see Gray 2009: 100–1) that is entailed in conducting a review of the literature before you start writing it up is taking place in front of a computer screen. It’s the fingers that are doing the walking rather than the researcher’s legs and eyes scanning a bookshelf. As more libraries have their stock out back than on the shelves, more and more news is produced for web-accessed reading and downloading, and policy documents and other sort of primary sources are available online, the very locale and nature of the search process is changing.

But the ease and facility of digital forms and search tools brings with it an increase in possibility. It is not uncommon to hear students complaining that they are suffering from a over-abundance of literature sources rather than a dearth. How to cope in this huge domain?

• One tip is to make a point of learning how search engines work – Google Scholar in particular, as its automated filters do a large amount of selection and filtering for you; there is an up and a down side to this sort of user-friendliness in web-saturated research cultures; see
  Chapter 5
  .
  
• Another tip here is to go back to basics, of a sort, and start with the required readings, bibliographies that you have accumulated during your course of study. You can use the reference sections from these works as texts for further research using the references in the original text to guide your search. This is another sort of ‘systematic literature review’.
  
• Third, when overwhelmed, try consulting the literature cited in books and articles that you consider central to your topic, your interest, or the approach you want to take or critique, whatever the case may be. This is the snowball principle of gathering literature and keeping your bearings; starting at the centre and moving outwards. There are other ways to conduct a literature review, however, a ‘systematic literature review’ can be an effective way to grasp a specific field of work that is relatively self-contained.
  

In the worst-case scenario this part of the work is a box that has to be ticked, often seen as a necessary albeit tiresome first base, one to move on from as quickly as possible. Moreover, a common problem in those settings where the literature review
is part of an early assessment stage, is that once done in that first year, first few months, it is treated as a hermetically sealed product.

In the best-case scenario, the process is an indispensable generator of knowledge and insight, one that hopefully emerges as a well-rehearsed synthesis of core texts, key debates, and larger ‘fields’. A knowledge and awareness of why certain texts or fields do
not
belong to your project is also part of this knowledge; what to leave out is just as crucial as fields continue to increase in scope and depth. What you are doing here is getting to know and then being able to show how you know your way around the literature.

• This first part of the process also socializes and situates the researcher in a community, whether this be of choice or circumstance.
  
• The second part, as part of the written, completed project, a review of the literature, puts the project in perspective by conveying both the broad, and the more specific fields in which the research took place, to which it speaks, and the direction it wants to take.
  

Presenting, and referring to the literature – the ‘field’ – confidently is also performed in non-written contexts: in research seminars, Ph.D. defences (the viva voce), conference panels, research funding interviews, and so on.
¹⁰

Remember, that as with the study itself this part of it remains work-in-progress. Instead of second-guessing about what you think is expected of you, becoming bogged down in all sorts of ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’ (see Creswell 2009: 24–5), or trying to cover all the literature bases and related fields at once, see this element as an integral part of your planning process, part of the research itself (see M. Davies 2007: 12–15), your learning and knowledge-acquisition that accompanies your own research-part, and then as a formative part of the writing process you engage after you’ve gathered, collated, and analysed both the literature, your ‘data’, and your findings.

Getting started and completing the literature review is a snapshot of what it means to learn to be selective and part of a larger set of conversations; something that is one of the hardest things to do when faced with a sea of possibility.

Citing others is the principle way academic writers locate themselves vis-à-vis their immediate, or larger
epistemic community
. Many first-timers in fact consider copious quoting the essence of being ‘scholarly’; academic writing must include lots and lots of quotes, or references to Big Thinkers (whether or not they are pertinent to the project). The why’s and wherefores of these attitudes aside, when citing directly, i.e. using the words written or spoken by others and indicating this with ‘quotation marks’ or as an indented passage on the written page, the writer is assuming responsibility for (1) citing
accurately
and as much in context as possible, and (2) for indicating
exactly where
the quote comes from.
Chapter 8
takes a closer look at how these basic principles work out in terms of citation formalities; an integral feature of academic style that can vary across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. For example, different conventions for citing authors, using what format and where these references are placed, exist between the social sciences and humanities, between the US and the UK.

This next section looks at a particular occupational hazard of research undertakings today; this is a tension between aspiring to produce an original piece of work (see
Chapter 2
) and obligations to ‘situate’ your project within a particular ‘field’ by way of the literature (see
Chapter 4
) and then produce a piece of formal writing (see
Chapter 8
). Or to put it another way, how much of your own words, your own ideas
are acceptable in academic work? Many students, depending on where they were educated, embarking on a major piece of independent research think that the bulk of their writing has to come from other sources; that their own ideas and insights are less important. The emphasis placed on acquiring, and showing knowledge of the field, including various bodies of literature, pulls them in one direction and exhortations to be original in the other.

Figure 4.1
All the authors?!

Source
:
http://Vadlo.com

Before addressing the way these confusions, and the performance stress of completing much academic output today, relate to issues of plagiarism as a rising or steady problem in intellectual labour in a digital age, one tip is worth bearing in mind. As you draft and rewrite the more theoretical parts of your work, notice how much of the page is your own words, including acknowledgement of sources and inspirations as appropriate, and how much consists of allusions or direct quotes. Are there more than two paragraphs, or even more than two pages in which your own ‘voice’ is not clear? If readers get no sense of what you, the author and researcher, have to say bar what you tell us about others, why continue reading?
¹¹

We now need to turn our attention to the issue of plagiarism.

Plagiarism
is the term used for cases when an author uses another person’s work as if it were their own; evidenced by passages of the work being copied (‘lifted’, ‘cut-and-pasted’) word for word, or all but directly from another source. Indiana University puts it succinctly: ‘Plagiarism is using others’ ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information’.
¹²
Clear acknowledgement entails certain sorts of signals in the text: quotation marks, indented extracts, which are all accompanied by references to the source, or allusions in notes if the source is not a published one. More on this in
Chapter 8
.

However, plagiarism not only occurs through technical oversights or inexperience with formal citation systems; when engaged on a systematic if not conscious level, this practice is considered a legal and ethical transgression in academic research, published (and so falling under intellectual property jurisprudence) and unpublished.
¹³
This is why, in academe unlike music-making or peer-to-peer communities, ‘file-sharing’ or ‘sampling’ without clear acknowledgement of your sources is not a sign of respect.
¹⁴
The double-edged nature of plagiarism in a context in which original ideas are currency within wider traditions of ideas, is encapsulated in a position statement from Duke University’s online guidelines. I cite at length:

As the web becomes the main source of information and research resource for successive generations of students, and working researchers, the ease with which anyone can access, download, or cut-and-paste from digital documents does not mean that this sort of citing lies outside academic citation conventions. Citing online sources is no longer a guessing game as publishers and high-profile universities codify these practices. And as a response many institutions sign up to digital, web-based software programs that than monitor students’ work before and as they ‘turn it in’.

A popular platform is Turnitin, a tool based on quantitative indicators, that ‘compares students’ work to a range of other electronic sources (including other students’ work) and highlights potential matches between texts’.
¹⁶
Whilst there are limits to what the results of a Turnitin search can tell about forms of plagiarism that are not discernable by quantity alone is an area of debate in itself.

The point here, particularly for those who are unused to the way academic citation codes and etiquette work in terms of written output, is to remember some underlying principles. These are covered briefly below as skills you need to have and attitudes you need to nurture.