Research Notes #16

Literature Reviewing

Jul 19, 2021

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This week, I am going to discuss how to write a literature review and do a deep dive into the realm of the anti-capitalist movement through scholarly research. Triggered by my obsession with David Harvey’s lectures in Marxism (podcast linked below) and an interview with Harvey on the Bad Faith podcast (youtube), I have returned to Capital and am now in search of volume 2 for purchase, along with the Grundrisse.

There has also been a recent surge in the number of "I Do Not Dream of Labor” videos on YouTube that prompted me to take a longer look at this leftist movement. Millennial and Gen Z folks are starting to see the “toxicity of hustle culture” (kristencwong.com) and turning to anti-capitalism as a haven from the stress of work. But there is always pushback and a quick search on YouTube will show that the conversation is nuanced and deep. Some claim that anti-capitalism is privilege, while others maintain it is part of the class struggle. There is also a vibrant conversation about cooperative economic movements that I tend to lean toward as I have always been interested in cooperative business models as a way forward.

Beyond Marx, my understanding of anti-capitalism was limited and so I wanted to use this week to do further research. I hope you are as happy to come along for the ride as I am to have you here with me as I demonstrate how to do a literature review of materials based on a specific topic. Getting back to those research notes roots and gaining some interesting knowledge along the way!

Today we will look at how to create a literature review and in a future post I will discuss the topic of anti-capitalism at greater length. Thank you for joining me and please let me know if you have thoughts on future topics of research by leaving a comment!

Celebrate Zaila!

Before we get into the content, I wanted to put a link here to celebrate Zaila Avant-garde (spellingbee.com) who won the National Spelling Bee last week. She is an amazing girl who is going to be an even more amazing woman. Spelling is only a side project for her and I am excited to see all the amazing things that her future holds.

Begin at the Beginning

Let’s start with the basics - what is a literature review and why is it necessary?

A literature review is something that researchers use to convey information from other academic resources on a topic. Basically, the reviewer chooses a handful (5-10 or more depending on your depth of research) of articles to read and summarize. According to the American Sociological Association style guide (owl.purdue.edu) (which greatly mirrors APA - one of the main standards in academic writing), the literature review should be the first major section of any paper, after the abstract and introduction.

Presenting a review of other sources gives the reader an understanding of research in the field around the topic of interest. Understanding the basics of a topic and some of the research that has already been contributed to the field, grounds the writer’s concepts and provides a jumping-off point for further study. Citations in this section are highly important and more information about the proper method of citing sources can also be found on the Purdue OWL site (owl.purdue.edu)

Finding Sources

If you are lucky enough to have access to an academic library, searching the journals online, through the institution’s library website, would be your first stop, but for those of us who may not have this access, public library catalogs and Google Scholar provide some good resources. My first stop for journals is always Google Scholar as it searches through all the online databases available to find copies of what you might be looking for. To search here, simply type scholar.google.com into your browser and it will take you to the Google Scholar search page. Google gives you the option to look through articles or case law, which can also come in handy to narrow the search. For this demonstration, we will look at articles. Type a search term in the search box and click enter or return as below:

For my search I received 47,500 results:

The results list is far too long to go through and read each entry, so I always par down the results through the use of filters. On the left sidebar, as you can see in the screenshot above, there are options for the timing of articles, relevance, and whether to include patents (useful for scientific articles) and/or citations. I always recommend looking for articles within the last 10 years that have citations. When I choose 2011-2021 under the custom range, it brings my results down to 1,640. Still long, but much more manageable to browse.

Note: Be aware, as you scroll through Google Scholar results, that you will have a number of book reviews sprinkled into the list. In an academic library search, you could further filter out these results to only return journal articles, but here you will need to just be aware of that if you do not want to read reviews of work, but rather the work itself.

Comparing a Google Scholar search to a regular Google search is striking. When I type ‘anti-capitalist movement’ into the regular Google search bar, I receive 27.9 million results, compared with the 47,500 I receive on Google Scholar. This is because the full-text search on Google returns every instance of that phrase across the entirety of the web, whereas Google Scholar is only searching within scholarly publications. This demonstrates how using Google proper to do a search can be quite time-consuming and lead one down a path of information that does not always relate to the original query. With Google Scholar, you can narrow the search to only those pieces of online writing that truly relate to the topic at hand.

Reviewing Resources

Once the search and review portion is complete, you can download the full-text articles that you deem interesting. This might require a bit of searching through library databases for resources as many articles are not available to the public and this is where your public library card and a site called WorldCat come in handy.

In WorldCat you can simply copy and paste the title of your article into the search bar and it will return a list of results across multiple libraries. By filling in the location box with your zip code, WorldCat can search libraries in your area that will have your preferred resources. From there, you can request the resources from libraries where you have access.

Writing the Review

Once collected, I save my resources in .pdf format, and then the work of reading and annotating articles can begin. I like to highlight as I read on the screen to remind myself of useful quotes and to better craft my summaries in context. Once all the articles are read and highlighted, the next step is to write the text of the literature review. This should summarize the views within each article and let the reader know the main points regarding the thesis that is being studied. Within this summary, citations are imperative. When writing for academia, a style is required (APA, ASA, MLA, etc.) but at the very least the writer will want to cite any direct quotes so as not to commit plagiarism.

I always use citations, even if I am writing something for myself, just in case I ever want to use that writing in the future. This allows me to have the citations ready to go and to recall which thoughts were my own and which came from the scholars’ work. When I was an undergrad I used the EasyBib citation tool to capture all my quotes, but it requires a subscription if you are not affiliated with a university system, so now I use an excel spreadsheet to keep track of quotes and links to articles for future research.

In Conclusion

The Literature Review is just the beginning of the researcher’s journey into the data. Sociological papers also include sections on limitations/biases, methodology, data analysis, and researcher arguments. For me, the literature review was the best part of doing research because it allowed me to better understand a wealth of resources on a specific topic of interest. It forced me to read the works of other researchers who I may not have come across organically and definitely never would have found from a simple Google search on the topic.

Pro tip: Once you find 3 - 5 great sources for your research, mining the citations from those papers will really open up the full scope of research available on the topic of your choice. It also cuts back on the time spent scrolling through long lists of search results.

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