Key Concepts: Literature Reviews

Overview from Deakin University

• Elements of the literature review: a list; a search; a survey; a vehicle for learning; a research facilitator; and a report.
• The literature review does not report new primary scholarship itself.

Overview from the University of Toronto

• A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. Organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. Try to synthesize and evaluate the literature according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question.
• Writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in two areas: (1) information seeking, which is the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books; and (2) critical appraisal, which is the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.

Overview from UNC

•  Literature reviews have thesis statements. A thesis statement will not necessarily argue for a position or an opinion; rather it will argue for a particular perspective on the material.
• Literature reviews should contain at least three basic elements: an introduction or background information section; the body of the review containing the discussion of sources; and, finally, a conclusion and/or recommendations section to end the paper.
  • Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review, such as the central theme or organizational pattern.
  • Body: Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either chronologically, thematically, or methodologically (see below for more information on each).
  • Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss what you have drawn from reviewing literature so far. Where might the discussion proceed?
   

Key Concepts: Developing the Study

Patten

• Strict replications - A study that mimics a previous study; the purpose is to obtain the same results.
• Modified replication - A study that is replicated from a previous study but with some major modifications.
• Descriptor - A key subject-matter term
• Record - All the information about a given article
• Literature review tip 1 - When citing literature on each topic, group references together when they have something in common.
• Literature review tip 2 - It is important to indicate the results of the research in the literature review, not just the description of the methodology.

Pyrczak

• Tip 1 for evaluating literature reviews - Has the author avoided citing sources for a single point?
• Tip 2 for evaluating literature reviews - Has the author distinguished between opinions and research findings?

Wildemuth

• Symmetry of potential outcome - Concept of whether or not the initial hypothesis is confirmed does not matter because the findings of the study will still be useful.
• Components of a good research question: (1) clear and easily understood; (2) specific enough to suggest the data that need to be collected; (3) answerable; and (4) interconnected with important concepts
• Evidence-based information - Information professionals should base their decisions on the strongest evidence available.
• Practice-based question - A research question that is abstract enough to be of interest beyond the local setting.
• Hypothesis - A conjectural statement of the relation between two or more variables
• Null hypothesis - A hypothesis that states there is no relationship between variables or no difference between one thing and another. 

Williams

• Directional hypothesis - A hypothesis that indicates the relationship between, or among, variables.
• The role of literature review - The literature review should include evaluative and critical judgments about the research literature, and that it should present a comparison of ideas and research findings, tying them together.

Article Review #1

Ashley Smith
September 20, 2011
Article Review #1

Jihyun, K. (2011). Motivations of faculty self-archiving in institutional repositories.
Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37(3), 246-254. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Introduction
Despite the growth of the Open Access (OA) movement and the greater ease of disseminating scholarly research through institutional repositories (IRs), many faculty members do not self-archive their research and journal articles in their institutions’ repositories.  This article explores two things:  (1) the factors that motivate faculty to deposit their scholarly research in their institution’s repositories and (2) the factors that impede them from self-archiving.  For my research topic, I’m interested in exploring ways to increase faculty contribution of their scholarly materials into their IRs.

Problem Statement
In her article, the author examines faculty members’ attitudes toward their institutions’ repositories and how four factors--costs, benefits, contextual factors, and individual traits--affect whether or not faculty are apt to self-archive their materials in IRs. 

Literature Review
Even though the author has almost fifty citations throughout her article, her literature review is only a one-sentence statement about how the body of literature is replete with studies that not only investigate faculty members’ attitudes toward IRs but also explore ways to increase their self-archiving rate.  Any kind of critical review consists primarily of previous studies that only measured faculty attitudes at one or two universities.  The author wanted to cast a wider net for her research.

Method
The author used an online survey and telephone interviews to gather data on faculty attitudes toward IRs at seventeen U.S., Carnegie doctorate-granting universities that have IRs.  Her sample was composed of two groups:  (1) 621 faculty members who had self-archived their research papers in their IRs and (2) 829 faculty members randomly selected from Science, Engineering, Social Science, and Humanities disciplines.  This second sample group included both faculty members whose disciplines had a firmly establish culture of self-archiving, such as Physics, Computer Science, and Economics, and other disciplines, such as Humanities, that did not have a strong culture of depositing materials in IRs.

The survey questionnaire consisted of four parts: (1) faculty members’ self-archiving experience and awareness of IRs, (2) faculty members’ perception of self-archiving, (3) faculty members’ future plans for self-archiving, and (4) faculty members’ demographics.   Each question provided five answer choices: (1) Strongly agree, (2) Agree, (3) Neutral, (4) Disagree, and (5) Strongly Disagree.  From the survey results, the author used 684 responses, or 45.6% , for her research analysis.  She then applied a logistic regression analysis where the dependent variable was whether or not a faculty member had self-archived material in his/her IR and the independent variables were the costs, benefit, contextual factors, and individual traits factors. 

After the conclusion of the online survey, the author e-mailed 151 faculty members who had indicated on the survey that she could contact them for a telephone interview.  Forty-one professors consented to be interviewed.  All telephone interviews were transcribed and then coded based on the four factors of costs, benefits, contextual factors, and individual traits. 
 
Caveats
My main caveat with the author’s research methodology focuses on reliability.  Would she obtain similar results if she surveyed and interviewed faculty members at smaller institutions, such as baccalaureate or professional schools?  Would she get comparable results if she studied faculty attitudes at academic institutions outside of the U.S.?  And, as mentioned earlier, the author's literature review was almost nonexistent.  Taking the time to discuss even just a couple of articles would help novice researchers understand why she approached the problem the way she did.

Key Concepts: Research Traditions

Connway & Powell

• Theory - A systematic explanation for the observations that relate to a particular aspect of life.
• Hypothesis - There are several definitions of hypothesis.  One general definition is a tentative generalization concerning the relationship between two or more variables of critical interest in the solution of a problem under investigation.
• Variable - Any property of a person, thing, event, setting, and so on that is not fixed.
• Validity - Research is considered valid when its conclusions are true.
• Reliability - Research is considered reliable when its findings are repeatable.

 Eldrege

• Case study - A research tool that describes and analyzes the author's experiences with a process, group, innovation, technology, project, population, program, or organization. It is used to answer how or why events occurred as reported.
• Gap Analysis - A research tool that involves surveys that seek to detect discrepancies, or gaps, between customer expectations of an organization and that organization's ability to deliver on those expectations.

 Patten

• Experimental studies - Researchers give treatments to their subjects and observe to see if there are changes in their subjects' behavior.  
• Nonexperimental studies - Researchers do not give treatments to their subjects, instead they observe their subjects as they naturally exist without experimental intervention. 

Pyrczak

• Purposive sample - A sample in which the researcher has some special interest and is not representative of a larger population (used in qualitative research).
• Random sample - A sample akin to drawing names out of a hat; it is supposed to be representative of the population from which it is drawn (used in quantitative research).

Standards of Reporting

• Significance of Topic - The topic of the manuscript should be significant to the scholarly community in one or more of the following ways: is timely and important; addresses an issue that has been neglected; is intrinsically interesting or edifying; fills a gap in current knowledge; and/or raises significant questions about extant knowledge.
• Standard of Substantiation - This standard of reporting requires the careful selection of various materials (the scholarly literature, archival evidence and documentation, appropriate examples, empirical data collected by the author) for inclusion in the manuscript that support its proffered portrayal or argument. In all cases, the standard of substantiation requires the careful selection of various materials (the scholarly literature, archival evidence and documentation, appropriate examples,
  empirical data collected by the author) for inclusion in the manuscript that support its proffered portrayal or argument.Substantiation is achieved in two general ways, which are not necessarily exclusive: (1) by establishing that the knowledge claims and arguments pertaining to representations and explanations of educational phenomena are warranted, and/or (2) by providing interpretations and portrayals of educational phenomena that are credible, persuasive, and/or effectively interrogatory.

 Williams

• Empiricism - Knowledge can only be based on what can objectively be observed and experienced.
• Paradigm - A set of interrelated assumptions about the social world which provides a philosophical and conceptual framework for the systematic study of that world.
• Methods triangulation - Checking the consistency of findings by using different data-collection methods
• Source triangulation - The cross-checking for consistency of the information derived at different times and from different people.

Key Concepts: Introductory Readings

Connaway & Powell

• Quantitative research - research methods that involve a problem-solving approach that is highly structured in nature and that relies on the quantification of concepts for purposes of measurement and evaluation
• Qualitative research - research methods that focus on observing events from the perspective of those involved and attempting to understand why individuals behave as they do

Wildemuth

• Evidence-based practice - the application of research results to improve professional practice
• Best practices - methods or processes that are developed through (1) significant amounts of direct experience or (2) through an examination of application of research findings

 Williams

• Positivist approach to research - research is an organized, systematic, data-based, critical, scientific inquiry or investigation into a specific problem undertaken with the objective to finding answers or solutions.  This approach emphasizes the collection of quantitative data, or data in the form of numbers that has been collected through questionnaires and other instruments of measurement
• Interpretivist approach to data - research is a process of trying to gain a better understanding of human interactions.  This approach emphasizes meanings created by people and data that are qualitative (in the form of words) collected by interviews and observations