We have already considered using specialized encyclopedia articles to provide initial overviews of unfamiliar subjects, but there are still other ways to gain overview information in systematic ways. Discovering these alternatives, however, requires a bit more sophistication in searching. All researchers, no matter what their subject areas, are especially well advised to look for a particular type or subset of journal articles called review articles. These should not be confused with book reviews.
Review articles are a type of literature unto themselves; in these, an author tries systematically to read all the relevant literature on a subject, sometimes also to interview experts in the field, and then to organize, synthesize, and critically evaluate the range of information. His or her goal is to provide a state-of-the-art assessment of knowledge in the particular field, and sometimes to indicate areas that need further research. A literature review article is somewhat like an encyclopedia article in trying to present a concise overview of a subject, but there are two important differences: (1) a review article is usually written for specialists rather than laypeople and so may assume familiarity with technical jargon; and (2) its bibliography will usually be extensive rather than selective or merely introductory.
In other words, if you are doing serious research and can find a literature review article on your subject in the early stages of your investigation, you are in great shape. The important point is that you have to look specifically for this type of literature. If you don’t deliberately limit your search by this document type, you may well lose sight of any review articles that come up within a simple keyword retrieval, as they can easily be lost or buried within much larger sets of citations. You want to make the review articles come up first. There are several ways to achieve this focus.
Web of Science Database.
The coverage of this file has been discussed in the two previous chapters; briefly, it indexes more than 13,500+ high-quality journals (and some thousands of books and conference proceedings) in almost all subject areas. Again, don’t be misled by the word Science in its title—it also covers social sciences and humanities sources. What is particularly relevant in the present context is that allows you to limit your results, via a drop-down menu of options, to any of three dozen specific types of literature, among them:
The crucial element to select here is simply “Review”; this is the designation in this database for “literature review” or “state-of-the-art” overview articles. (Note that other, and very different, “review” types are given separate designations of their own.)
Unfortunately, this option, as of this writing, is rather well hidden. To find it you must first get past the single search box of the initial default page by clicking on “Add Another Field”; you need to have at least two search boxes on the screen for this to work. With the second box, use its drop-down menu to get past the initial “Topic” option and scroll down until you find “Document Type.” Click on that. The new search box on its left will then present a default line saying “All Document Types.” Use its drop-down menu to locate the “Review” option and click there. This change in the second box will now limit your keywords in the first “Topic” box to search for only literature reviews.
Since this database is so marvelously cross-disciplinary, covering almost all subject areas, it can find review articles on just about anything (assuming they exist to begin with, of course). I am always astonished at how frequently they turn up, no matter what people are working on; in my own experience in helping readers I’ve found literature review articles with titles such as these:
Using the “Review” feature of this database is an excellent way to find such articles quickly, across the whole range of scholarly disciplines.
I have noticed, however, that the coding for the “Review” document type is not always applied where it should be, and that additional review articles can sometimes be squeezed out of the same database by doing a regular keyword search in the “Advanced Search” box. To find the “Advanced” box to begin with, you must click on the drop-down arrow next to the default “Basic Search” option. Once there, ignore the lower box that allows limits by document types. Instead, simply type in your topical keywords but add a particular string of additional terms, as in this example that seeks additional review articles about “visitors’ behavior in zoos”:
TS=zoo* AND (TS=visitor* OR TS=touris*) AND (TS=“meta-analysis” OR TS=metaanalysis OR TS=survey OR TS=synthesis OR TS=overview OR TS=“systematic analysis” OR TI=review).
Among the results provided by this string is the article “Visitors’ effects on the welfare of animals in the zoo: A review” (2007; 63 footnotes), which is a good complement to the first of the sample articles listed above; but this 2007 article itself is mistakenly coded within the Document Type drop-down menu as a regular “Article” rather than as a “Review,” and so it would not show up to begin with if you had limited your search to “Review.”
(In the string of terms given above, “TS” refers to the word[s] following the “=” sign as findable in any of the Topical Subject fields of the record [i.e., titles, abstracts, or “KeyWords Plus” terms]; but “TI” limits the subsequent word’s appearance only to the Title field. In these situations it is best to limit the keyword “review” only to appearances within the titles of articles; if allowed to appear with abstracts, the term too often appears in the wrong context. The asterisk [*] is a truncation symbol; its use will retrieve all instances of words having the same stem, such as “zoo,” “zoos,” “zoological,” etc. In this instance, one could simply search for “meta*” rather than type the full terms “meta-analysis” OR “metaanalysis”; but doing that will open up the door to the appearance of too many undesirable words having the same stem, such as “metaphor,” “metaphorical,” “metabolism,” “metallic,” or “metastasis.” [See Chapter 10 for more on truncation.])
As discussed previously, this source covers 22,000 peer-reviewed jounals in all subject areas. It too has a clickable limit feature that allows you to narrow your search exclusively to literature “Review” articles. Its coverage extends well past that of Web of Science, particularly in Humanities and Social Sciences fields.
Various publishers (especially Annual Reviews, Inc.) produce different series of review articles in many fields. They have titles such as Annual Review of Anthropology; of Astronomy and Astrophysics; of Biochemistry; of Environment and Resources; of Information Science and Technology; of Law and Social Science; of Materials Research; of Physical Chemistry; of Political Science; of Psychology; of Sociology.
This database covers more than 500 journals in the fields of library and information science, with more than 440 of them full text. It is useful in finding review-type articles because reference librarians often publish for each other annotated bibliographies or bibliographic essays that discuss all the best sources (including websites) or finding aids on particular subjects (e.g., on women in religion, on novels set in academia, on the human–companion animal bond, on AfricanAmerican health issues). Unfortunately, nobody except reference librarians uses this source for this purpose, but it deserves a wider audience because the articles and annotated bibliographies to which it points are often first-rate starting points for research.
This comprises volumes 1 and 2 of the set Great Books of the Western World, 2nd ed., 60 vols. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990). It provides 102 review articles on philosophical subjects, with indexing of relevant passages from all of the 517 works included in the set. A kind of shortcut to many of the indexed passages is provided by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s Great Treasury of Western Thought (1,771 pages; Bowker, 1977), which provides in one volume long quotations of the actual texts of many of the philosophical and literary works that are referred to in the Syntopicon’s review articles. Great Treasury also includes quotations from many classic works beyond those that are included in the Great Books set.
This organization, founded by Mortimer Adler to expand on the reviews done in the Syntopicon, produced several articles and full-length books that summarize the history of thought on various important ideas. Among these publications are:
Each of these studies spells out very articulately what might be called “the range of options” of thought that has been covered on these most important topics over a span of more than two millenia. Since many of the books that are discussed “talk past each other” by using the same terms with different meanings, these volumes (and essays) serve a very useful purpose in regridding the various discussions in a way that standardizes their terminologies and allows better comparisons of the ideas. Especially recommended are the extraordinarily insightful overviews of Freedom by Van Doren (following Adler), Justice by Bird, and “Religion” by Sullivan and Clouser.
These are frequently overlooked by academic researchers, but they can be real gold mines of information. Congressional investigations and oversight reviews extend into an amazing range of subject areas in the social sciences and sciences. (One estimate is that 20 hearings are held every day.) When the U.S. Congress wishes to find the best information on the current state of any situation, it generally gets it, for it can readily summon the best experts to testify. (See the further discussion of hearings, with examples, in Chapter 13.)
In addition to drawing on hearings for information, Congress can use the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress, which often produces book-length “state of the situation” reports on public policy issues. The virtue of these studies is that they are strictly objective, factual, and nonpartisan; CRS analysts are not allowed to advocate particular positions—they can only present the range of facts and issues that need to be considered by lawmakers. ProQuest Congressional Publications provides full-text level access. This database includes Legislative Reference Service (the predecessor of CRS) and CRS reports back to 1916, and all other committee prints back to 1817.
Additional online sources for CRS reports include:
As of the present writing, the Congressional Research Service is not allowed to mount either its own reports online or its own database listing the reports; CRS can provide its research studies only to members of Congress and their staffs. Congressional offices, however, are usually happy to obtain copies for constituents who request them, but the requests must be made to the members’ offices, not to CRS itself.
These are sometimes useful for review-type surveys of the literature of particular subject areas, especially in areas of the humanities and social sciences—although sciences are covered, too—that don’t get picked up by the Annual Review–type series. Frequently writers will begin their dissertations with a survey of the literature of a field to present a background and context for their own contribution to it. The best index is the database Dissertations & Theses: Full-Text from ProQuest; it includes full texts of American and Canadian dissertations and master’s theses since 1997. (Full texts are offered selectively prior to that year). Many libraries, however, will subscribe to the Dissertations database only at the indexing level of abstracts, without the full texts themselves. The company will sell copies of individual dissertations or master’s theses from all years, however, in either microfiche or paper formats, but master’s theses are not covered as extensively as dissertations. (For additional sources of dissertations, see Chapter 5.)
Review articles or overviews located through any of the above sources can often be updated by running them through the citation indexes (Chapter 6) to see if there has been any subsequent discussion of them.
The overall point to remember is that literature review sources, like encyclopedia articles, are often excellent starting points for research projects. Encyclopedias provide quick overviews of new or unfamiliar subjects, while reviews provide overviews not only of the content of the subject, but of the range of literature on the subject as well. Finding such articles early in your research can give you reasonable confidence that your are not completely overlooking sources that are very important—and whose existence might be brought to your attention later on, rather painfully, if you do overlook them. (This is a perennial concern for graduate students who are writing dissertations.) Finding these overviews can also give you a reasonable sense that you’re not laboriously re-inventing the wheel in duplicating research that has already been done by prior investigators. But you do have to look for both specialized encyclopedia articles and literature reviews specifically—otherwise they can easily be overlooked or buried within huge jumbles of results from larger, unfocused computer searches that fail both to notice and to zero in on these literature formats.