Search Strategies

An approach some students use is the generally-browse-and-peruse strategy. They hunt for books and journals in the broad area of their topic, then read the sources in detail, hoping to find material that might apply to their project. In our experience such a method is very inefficient. A specify-and-look-up strategy is far more productive because it saves lots of time, eliminates wading through pages that will be of no use, and guides you to where relevant material should be located in your project.When employing a specify-and-look-up approach, you first decide which functions you intend your literature survey to serve. Those functions can be cast as questions you plan to answer, such as

Additional questions of this sort can focus on the other functions we described earlier in this chapter. Armed with your guide questions, you skim through book chapters, journal articles, or newspaper accounts to find the answers you seek. As a result, you rarely, if ever, read a book straight through. Instead, you hunt up answers to your questions. In some instances this will require a detailed perusal of one or more chapters--sometimes an entire book or monograph--as when you wish to thoroughly understand the theory on which the study was grounded. In other cases, your task consists of hunting only for a key word or phrase in the book's index (as in learning how an author defined a term that will be important in your project); then you read only the pages whose numbers appear for that word in the index. Sometimes your search will be guided by a single question. In other cases, you will find it economical to look up answers to several questions at the same time in order to make the most efficient use of a book, dissertation, or journal that would be difficult or inconvenient to obtain on a future occasion.

Examples of key words used in a literature search Here are two examples of key words whose meanings students might seek in their literature search. The first example is from a project titled Social-Class Changes in a Southern Town--1945-1995. The second is titled Treatment Plans for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

Social-Class Changes in a Southern Town--1945-1995: Key terms can be selected either to address the project's topic in general or to focus on a particular function that the literature is expected to serve. General key terms for the study of social class can include social class, social stratification, socioeconomic status (SES), social structure, upper class, middle class, lower class, minorities, the rich, the poor, wealth, and poverty. Words specific to a function, such as that of generating research methods for the social-class study, could include social-science research methods, survey techniques, interview techniques, social-class scales, scaling methods, and social-class typologies.  

Treatment Plans for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD): General key words for the study of attention deficit can be attention, attention deficit disorder (ADD), hyperactivity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), inattention, and distractibility. If one of the chosen functions of the literature search is that of locating ADD within the learning-disorders domain of knowledge, then key terms--in addition to the foregoing general ones--could include learning disorders, learning handicaps, disadvantaged learners, special education, remedial education, and teaching the handicapped.

In summary, as you plan your literature review, you will likely find it helpful to decide which functions the review should perform and then to select both general and specific-function terms to guide your effort.

Where to Hunt

Thanks to personal computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, the task of finding suitable resources has been dramatically simplified and the outcome markedly enriched over the past two decades. Prior to the 1980s, researchers-including graduate students--were obliged to hunt for pertinent literature by fingering through library card catalogues, inspecting the references listed in the closing pages of books, questioning professors and fellow students, and hunting through volumes containing abstracts of studies in a given discipline. Today, a student with a personal computer at hand, and a modem that connects the computer via the phone lines to an Internet server, can discover appropriate literature sources that may be located all over the world. Thus, the best place to begin your search is probably at a computer connected to an Internet server. The server may be located in your own college or university, or it may be a commercial provider, such as America Online, CompuServe, or AT&T WorldNet.

Some libraries' lists of bookholdings are available to anyone with access to the World Wide Web. However, more specialized data banks--such as lists of journal or newspaper articles and their abstracts--require a password available only to certain kinds of users, such as faculty members and students of the school in which you are enrolled. Hence, you can get a password for your own university library's restricted services, but probably not for those services in other institutions' libraries unless you make special arrangements.

In addition to taking advantage of the Internet, you still may--as in "the good old days"--profit from asking the advice of professors, fellow students, and librarians as you pursue answers to your literature-search queries.

The libraries of most higher-education institutions have an open-stack policy. Students are permitted to wander among the rows of shelved books and bound journals, inspect the titles, and look through any volumes they choose. However, some libraries maintain a closed-stack policy. In order to get a book, a user must find the book's call number and title in the library's catalogue, write that information on an order card, and hand the order to a librarian who will then have a library employee find the volume and deliver it to the check-out desk. An open-stack policy is much to your advantage, for it permits you to find the sections of the library's holdings that are most relevant to your project and to browse among the titles shelved there to find sources that may be of use. You can then inspect the tables of contents and indexes of those books to locate answers to your search questions. You can also inspect the lists of references at the ends of chapters or ends of journal articles to find resources that bear on your topic.

What to Record and How to Record It

If you have used function questions to guide your search, then the problem of what to record from the literature is obviously solved. You simply write answers to your questions. It is also the case that, as you survey the literature, contents of the article or chapter you are reading may suggest further search questions that had not occurred to you before. Thus, you not only record the information you have found but also add to your search strategy the question generated by that information.

The matter of how to record what you find can involve considering both what form to use and how to code what you record.

The form

Which form of recording will be most suitable is influenced by your location, your skills, your facilities, the expense, and the time available. If you are using a book or journal in a library, you may find it most feasible to take hand-written notes. Or if the library has photocopying facilities for patrons' use, you may choose to photocopy passages from a resource. If you have checked a book or journal out of the library and have it at home near your computer, you can enter quotations or summaries of passages by keying them with your word-processing program.If you need to quote extensive portions of a book chapter or article and then use those quotations as part of your thesis or dissertation, you will find that a scanner which utilizes an OCR (optical character recognition) program is a great boon. Although photocopying a document furnishes you an exact copy of that document, it does not allow you to enter the document directly into your dissertation. But by placing the source of the quotation--book, magazine, or photocopied item--in a scanner attached to your computer, and utilizing an OCR program, you can copy pages and save them in the word-processing program you are using. You are then able to treat that material the same as you would if you had typed it into the computer yourself. The quoted material can be edited or moved around however you wish.Sometimes you may find it convenient to orally enter summaries or quotations into a tape recorder. One advantage is that speaking is usually faster than writing. Obviously, using a tape recorder requires that you be in a situation in which your talk doesn't disturb others, and the location needs to be free from noise that would muddle the recording.You can save yourself time and grief if, at the outset of your project, you prepare (a) the bibliographic style you intend to use in the final version of your project, (b) the manner in which you will cite references and add notes, and (c) a coding system for indicating where in your project you plan to utilize selections from the professional literature.

Bibliographic style: For the final version of your thesis or dissertation, there are several popular ways of citing the literature resources you have used. One way is to place all of your references in an alphabetical list at the end of your document. Sometimes this list is labeled Bibliography and contains sources that you consulted, even ones that you do not cite specifically in the body of your work. Or the list may be titled References and limited to items that you refer to in your document.Here are two of the standard forms for listing references. The first is from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association ( 1994) and is commonly used for works in the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, education, and political science.

Other acceptable variations of each of these forms can be found in the bibliographies and lists of references in books and journals in your field of study. Since you will need information about the style used for kinds of publications other than books and journal articles (such as unpublished dissertations, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, and personal communications), you will find it helpful to consult such sources as the APA and Chicago manuals.

When you select a style, it is important (a) that it be acceptable to the members of the faculty committee that supervise your project and (b) that you consistently stick to that same style throughout your work. In some universities, the rules governing the form of theses and dissertations are available in a booklet or style sheet available in the central library, in your own department, in the campus bookstore, or in the graduate school office. If your institution has such a publication, you can benefit from obtaining a copy at an early stage of your project.

Citations and notes: Throughout the final version of your study, you are obligated to identify the literature resources from which you have drawn quotations and key concepts. There are several common ways of citing such references. One way that has increased in popularity over recent decades is to note the name of the author and the year of publication in parentheses. Then readers can find the exact title and publisher of the book or article in the list of references at the end of your document. That's the system we use throughout this book.

An alternative approach involves a superscript--a small number raised above the line, like this ¹ --which guides readers to the cited source at the bottom of the page. Sometimes the source that is signaled by a superscript is not displayed at the bottom on the page but, rather, it is located in a numbered bibliographic list at the end of the current chapter or at the end of the entire document. You may occasionally wish to add an explanatory note to a segment of your presentation, but you don't want to interrupt the flow of thought of the present paragraph. There are several options for adding informative material. One is to place the added comments in parentheses within the body of the writing. (Such a note then looks like this, which does, indeed, interrupt the flow, but the parentheses show the reader that the inserted comment is simply an aside.) Another popular practice is to cast the addition as a footnote at the bottom of the page, signaled by a superscript. Or else the insertion can be an end-note in a listing of such notes at the close of the chapter or at the end of the thesis or dissertation. ____________________

These options and others are illustrated in such resources as the Chicago Manual of Style ( 1993).

Coding material from the literature: The word coding is used here to mean attaching code numbers or letters to each passage or set of notes that you take from the professional literature. The code indicates what function you intend the passage or notes to perform in your project. We are thus suggesting that you should not take any material from the literature (quotations, concepts, theories, appraisals) unless you can estimate where in your work that material will likely be used. We believe it's a waste of time to lift passages from a book or journal simply because such material "might be useful someplace or other."Once you have selected the topic or research problem on which your project will focus, you should be able to predict, at least in a general way, the kind of content and pattern of organization that your thesis or dissertation will assume. To make such a prediction requires that you (a) envision the kinds of questions your project will answer for readers and (b) estimate the sequence of chapters or sections into which your entire document will be divided. One way to accomplish this task is first to list the questions you hope to answer for the reading audience. To illustrate, here's a list of questions for a dissertation in the field of English literature that will be entitled An Analysis of Traditional and Modern Verse Forms. The questions need not be listed in the same sequence in which they will be answered in the completed dissertation.

The way code numbers for the 12 questions can be attached to material taken from the literature is shown in Figure 3-1. Here, the student has photocopied a verse from a book entitled Glimpses of England and has written at the bottom of the poem the code numbers for three of the her guide questions--numbers 7 (foot and meter schemes), 8 (rhyme schemes), and 10 (linking the verse form to its subject matter). To indicate more precisely how she thinks the material might be used, she has noted exact features of 7 (iambic foot and pentameter meter) and 8 (internal rhyme and end-line rhyme pattern) that she would want to include in her dissertation; and she plans to include the quoted verse about Shakespeare's plays as one example.

On the reverse side of the sheet on which she photocopied the verse, she wrote the bibliographical information that would be needed for the list of references at the end of the dissertation; and she noted, in the following fashion, the citation that would accompany the verse when she reproduced it in her document.

The value of coding becomes apparent when you begin to draft one of your chapters. For example, when the author of the dissertation on verse forms prepares to write Chapter III: Foot and Meter, she simply gathers all of her notes that bear the code numbers 6, 7, or 11, and arranges them in the order in which she plans to write about the topics that the different notes address. If she had not coded the notes, she would have needed to inspect every item in her entire collection of references in order to locate the ones that concerned foot and meter.

A second example illustrates a different way of coding material from the literature. The project in this case is a thesis titled School Principals' Leadership Styles--A Comparative Study. The focus of the literature search is not a set of questions but, rather, a list of topics. And the code does not consist of numbers but of key words. Some researchers prefer key words to numbers because they find it easier to remember what the words refer to than what the numbers signify. Here, then, is the list of topics that are the object of the literature search, with the topics accompanied by their code words.

Figure 3-2 shows how two photocopied segments of a book entitled Staying on Track ( Brubaker & Coble, 1997) have been coded in the margin adjacent to the passages. For each passage, the book's page number is added below the code word and the full bibliographic reference is written on the back of the sheet. Figure 3-2
Word-Coding Passages

The same sort of margin notation can be used to identify concepts, theories, appraisals, viewpoints, and the like that are not quoted directly but are summarized in the thesis writer's own words. Here is an example from the leadershipstyles project. It's in the form of a note written on a note card that includes not only the writer's summary but also the source of the information ( Figure 3-3 ).As with the dissertation about verse forms, the organization pattern for the thesis about leadership can be predicted at an early stage of the project by the author asking himself two questions:

The first question identifies the desired content for the thesis. The second focuses on the manner in which such content can effectively be presented--the sequence of ideas that readers will meet. Estimating ahead of time what a thesis' organizational pattern should be serves to sharpen your focus as you develop your project. In particular, it helps you distinguish among four sources of the contents--(a) the professional literature, (b) your faculty advisors and fellow students, (c) information you may collect directly by means of testing, an opinion survey, an experiment, or the like, and (d) creative thinking that you must do on your own as you devise hypotheses, theories, methods of gathering data, and interpretations of what you discover from your investigation. Consider the following organization of the school-principals project that the student could preplan, after deciding that the study will focus on the styles of eight representative school principals. The preplan also indicates the intended location of the wordcoded material from the professional literature.

Figure 3-3
Word-Coding Note Cards

Theory  Resource-mobilization theory proposes that thebest leaders are skilled at collecting the resourcesneeded to do the job. p. 565              Leaders do this by forming coalitions with existinggroups and organizations, getting financial support,and generating effective political pressure.             Turner Ralph H. ( 1994). "Collective behavior".Encyclopaedia Britannica (vol, 16). Chicago:Encyclopaedia Britannica.             PART I. A Foundation for Studying Principals' Leadership Styles             Chapter 1: The School Principal and Alternative Conceptions of Leadership DEFINE, CRITERIA, THEORY, STYLE             Chapter 2: Principals as Decision Makers DECIDE              PART II. The Styles of Eight Principals             Chapter 3: The Research Design METHOD, STYLE, CAUSE             Chapter 4: Creating the Interview Plan, Questionnaire, and Observation Plan METHOD, DECIDE             Chapter 5: Administering the Interview and Questionnaire  Chapter 6: Conducting Observations METHOD             Chapter 7: Classifying the Responses STYLE, STRAT, THEORY             Chapter 8: Interpreting the Results THEORY              PART III. Implications of the Study             Chapter 9: Conclusions and Suggestions for Enhancing Leadership Skills THEORY, STRAT It should be apparent that such a preplan may require changes as the research progresses. But even in its initial sketchy form, the plan serves as a useful guide to (a) what the professional literature can contribute and (b) where the coded material from the literature can suitably be placed. Clearly, there is nothing sacrosanct about the two methods of coding illustrated above. They are merely samples. You may prefer to create a system of your own that is better suited to your taste and work habits.