There’s an old axiom that the best readers make the best writers. We can amend that slightly to the best readers make the best researchers. Those who approach their research agendaResearch agendaAn iterative document or statement that provides a roadmap to your short and long term topics and ideas you’d like to research. with a solid grounding in the literature will have the essential foundation for identifying and building upon, challenging and critiquing, and contextualizing and synthesizing their research questions, theoretical frameworks, and methods.
Keeping track of publications of general interest to your research agenda can inspire, motivate, and spark curiosity when you’re in the brainstorming stage, but it’s also a helpful way to avoid feeling overwhelmed when you’re actively pursuing a new research project. Sitting down to write your literature reviewLiterature ReviewThe process of summarizing, synthesizing and/or critiquing literature around a specific topic/idea. This work can help a researcher understand what has happened before and also how past research intersects and or diverges from other research. A literature review can be a full-length manuscript or a subsection within a larger research article. is much easier when you already have a list of articles to pull from.
Tips for Reading Consistently
Finding the time to commit to reading is its own challenge, so the following tips can help you build a manageable habit that can save time later:
Identify journals that you want to read regularly. To do this, see where your peers and mentors are publishing, search for journals and check , and use aim and scope statements to ensure relevancy to your subject area and audience.
Set a calendar reminder — daily, weekly, monthly, whatever is reasonable for your schedule — to hold yourself accountable to your reading commitment.
Develop an organizational strategy as simple as a spreadsheet with citation information or as intricate as a system using a subscription-based citation management system like Zotero or EndNote.
You’re ready to make this worthy investment, but how do you start identifying journals, publications, conferences, and other outlets? The answer to that is every librarian’s favorite response: “it depends.” What subject area do you want to explore? Are you looking for theoretical or field-based knowledge? What audience do you intend to reach? Are you looking at international, national, or regional work? Your development of a research identity directing your research agenda will inform this process for you.
The following resources and tips are meant to act as a starting point as you scope the literature — it is not inclusive of all options and should serve as the first step to a deep dive into the literature:
Start with resources created for the LISLibrary and Information ScienceAn interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. discipline and then expand as you find related fields.
The SCImago Journal & Country Rank portal allows you to view publications by field, regions/countries, and format and sort by various metric methods.
Open Access resources like LISTA, ERIC, DOAJ, and OpenDOAR can help you find freely available information.
Larger journal publishers (like Springer, Sage, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley) have journal suggester tools that provide recommendations for journals within their titles.
Exercise
Complete the following exercise in your LPOL Workbook. This exercise will help you check for learning, engage with the material, and work through new ideas.
This exercise is meant to provide an example of how to identify foundational publications and articles with a specific research query and then help you select the relevant literature for your own research agenda. First, review the example below:
Doria entered graduate school with a well-defined researcher identity and a research agenda related to library worker morale in academic libraries. She regularly read peer-reviewed journals like:
As she read, she would note authors and referenced works of interest in a spreadsheet where she tracked citations. She would often follow authors on social media and look at their personal websites to track where they disseminated their research. As a result of reading widely, Doria encountered foundational work for her research agenda, including Fobazi Ettarh’s (2018) “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” Kaetrena Davis Kendrick’s (2017) “The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study,” and Meredith Farkas’ (2021) “What is Slow Librarianship?” Doria began her research with newly grounded research questions and a framework with which to approach her study.
The 2.1.2: Foundational Literature worksheet in your LPOL Workbook will demonstrate how to use these resources and give you an opportunity to explore the literature relevant to your own research agenda.
As you search, you’ll discover that many publications use various metrics to demonstrate their place of prestige within the field. These prestigious resources can absolutely be useful, but the current information landscape is complex, and it is worth exploring multiple types of information for your work. Literature that inspires and informs your work may not always come in traditional, academic packages. Books, journals, and academic databases should play a role in your literature-gathering alongside social media, websites, and blogs. Conventional methods of measuring research impactResearch impactA way to describe and measure the ways in which research causes some sort of positive impact on a community. Research impact can be measured through quantitative or qualitative data.
like the Journal Impact FactorJournal Impact FactorA measure used to show the average amount of times an article within a certain journal has been cited within a period of time. This factor can be used by a discipline to determine the importance or status of a journal. and Journal Usage FactorJournal Usage FactorA calculation done by taking the number of times articles have been downloaded divided by the total number of articles published within a journal for a certain period of time. This number can be used to complement a journal impact factor. have long had their own issues, which has been further complicated with new metrics.
The following table, based on Rachel Miles’s (2018) “Visualizing Research,” provides an overview of different research impact indicators for you to be better informed about how to factor metrics into your search.
Research Impact Indicator
Description
Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Journals’ average citations per article, typically in a 2-5-year time frame
Journal Usage Factor (JUF)
Journals’ average usage metrics, e.g., downloads, page views
Citation counts
Article/book total citations in other articles/books
Usage statistics
Article/book downloads/page views
Altmetrics
Measurement of an article impact rather than the outlet where it was published, including bookmarks, links, Twitter mentions, page views, non-academic citations, etc.
Author h-index
Cumulative impact of an author’s work that reflects citations and output, e.g., an h-index of 25 means the author published at least 25 journal articles with 25 citations
Table 1. Created by Kirsten Hostetler for LibParlor Online Learning, 2023.
Wilson, Virginia. “Looking to the Literature: Open Access and Free Sources of LIS Evidence.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 4, no. 3 (2009): 75–77. doi.org/10.18438/B80C9Z.
Scoping the Relevant Literature
There’s an old axiom that the best readers make the best writers. We can amend that slightly to the best readers make the best researchers. Those who approach their research agendaResearch agenda An iterative document or statement that provides a roadmap to your short and long term topics and ideas you’d like to research. with a solid grounding in the literature will have the essential foundation for identifying and building upon, challenging and critiquing, and contextualizing and synthesizing their research questions, theoretical frameworks, and methods.
Keeping track of publications of general interest to your research agenda can inspire, motivate, and spark curiosity when you’re in the brainstorming stage, but it’s also a helpful way to avoid feeling overwhelmed when you’re actively pursuing a new research project. Sitting down to write your literature reviewLiterature Review The process of summarizing, synthesizing and/or critiquing literature around a specific topic/idea. This work can help a researcher understand what has happened before and also how past research intersects and or diverges from other research. A literature review can be a full-length manuscript or a subsection within a larger research article. is much easier when you already have a list of articles to pull from.
Tips for Reading Consistently
Finding the time to commit to reading is its own challenge, so the following tips can help you build a manageable habit that can save time later:
You’re ready to make this worthy investment, but how do you start identifying journals, publications, conferences, and other outlets? The answer to that is every librarian’s favorite response: “it depends.” What subject area do you want to explore? Are you looking for theoretical or field-based knowledge? What audience do you intend to reach? Are you looking at international, national, or regional work? Your development of a research identity directing your research agenda will inform this process for you.
The following resources and tips are meant to act as a starting point as you scope the literature — it is not inclusive of all options and should serve as the first step to a deep dive into the literature:
Exercise
Complete the following exercise in your LPOL Workbook. This exercise will help you check for learning, engage with the material, and work through new ideas.
This exercise is meant to provide an example of how to identify foundational publications and articles with a specific research query and then help you select the relevant literature for your own research agenda. First, review the example below:
Doria entered graduate school with a well-defined researcher identity and a research agenda related to library worker morale in academic libraries. She regularly read peer-reviewed journals like:
As she read, she would note authors and referenced works of interest in a spreadsheet where she tracked citations. She would often follow authors on social media and look at their personal websites to track where they disseminated their research. As a result of reading widely, Doria encountered foundational work for her research agenda, including Fobazi Ettarh’s (2018) “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” Kaetrena Davis Kendrick’s (2017) “The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study,” and Meredith Farkas’ (2021) “What is Slow Librarianship?” Doria began her research with newly grounded research questions and a framework with which to approach her study.
The 2.1.2: Foundational Literature worksheet in your LPOL Workbook will demonstrate how to use these resources and give you an opportunity to explore the literature relevant to your own research agenda.
As you search, you’ll discover that many publications use various metrics to demonstrate their place of prestige within the field. These prestigious resources can absolutely be useful, but the current information landscape is complex, and it is worth exploring multiple types of information for your work. Literature that inspires and informs your work may not always come in traditional, academic packages. Books, journals, and academic databases should play a role in your literature-gathering alongside social media, websites, and blogs. Conventional methods of measuring research impactResearch impact A way to describe and measure the ways in which research causes some sort of positive impact on a community. Research impact can be measured through quantitative or qualitative data. like the Journal Impact FactorJournal Impact Factor A measure used to show the average amount of times an article within a certain journal has been cited within a period of time. This factor can be used by a discipline to determine the importance or status of a journal. and Journal Usage FactorJournal Usage Factor A calculation done by taking the number of times articles have been downloaded divided by the total number of articles published within a journal for a certain period of time. This number can be used to complement a journal impact factor. have long had their own issues, which has been further complicated with new metrics.
The following table, based on Rachel Miles’s (2018) “Visualizing Research,” provides an overview of different research impact indicators for you to be better informed about how to factor metrics into your search.
Topic 2 References
Miles, Rachel. “Visualizing Research.” The Librarian Parlor July 3, 2018. https://libparlor.com/2018/07/03/visualizing-research/.
Priem, Jason, Taraborelli, Dario, Groth, Paul, and Neylon, Cameron. “Altmetrics: A Manifesto.” Altmetrics online. October 26, 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto.
Singh Chawla, Dalmeet. “What’s Wrong with the Journal Impact Factor in 5 Graphs.” Nature Index online. April 3, 2018. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news-blog/whats-wrong-with-the-jif-in-five-graphs.
Wilson, Virginia. “Looking to the Literature: Open Access and Free Sources of LIS Evidence.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 4, no. 3 (2009): 75–77. doi.org/10.18438/B80C9Z.