Sort and prioritize your sources

[Mike Dillinger, PhD]

For Task 2, you found many sources for information about your research question, hopefully 50 or more. Don’t even consider reading all of them! You will rarely need to do a totally complete and comprehensive review of all of the research literature that has ever been written on a particular topic. That is exhausting both for you, the writer, and for the reader. Instead, you want to pick the best sources and focus on them. They way that you pick and organize your sources shows a professional reader a lot about how you think about your research problem.

Sort your sources first. Make separate piles of your paper sources (books, photocopies, notes, etc.) and make separate folders for your electronic sources (reference lists, pdf files, etc.). You need separate piles because you will read, digest, and write about them separately. You won’t need a separate pile for your Closing paragraph.

• Make one pile or folder for your Opening. Include any sources that will help you convince the reader that your research problem is important to study. Statistics about how many people are affected by your problem or about how much money is spent trying to fix it are usually helpful.
• Make another pile for your General Background. Include sources that talk about how your process and sub-process work in general. For example, what parts or stages have researchers identified for your process? [Your sub-process should be one of them.] What kinds of things make your sub-process faster, slower, more accurate, more error-prone, etc.? Review articles, book chapters, and books by researchers are often good for this. Experimental articles often have good information about this in their Lit Reviews, so you may want to put a separate copy of some of your experimental articles in this pile, too.
• Make another pile for Factor 1, to help you write the specific background sections. Include experimental articles that investigate how your factor 1 affects your sub-process. Usually, both your factor 1 and your process or sub-process will be mentioned in the title of the article or in the abstract.
• Make another pile for Factor 2, too. Include experimental articles that investigate how your factor 2 affects your sub-process. Usually, both your factor 2 and your process or sub-process will be mentioned in the title of the article or in the abstract.
• Finally, make another pile for experiments that study BOTH of your factors. These are sometimes harder to find, so you may have to go back and search for more at this point.

If you are not sure exactly where a particular article should go, then that’s a topic for discussion. See if reading the abstract can help you decide. It should be very, very clear to you that a given source has to be on one pile or the other. Be prepared to explain why you put it there. Discuss any doubts with your partner until you both agree. Bring to class any articles that you cannot classify, for discussion.

Prioritize the sources in each pile. Skip the Opening pile for now. Separate each of the other piles into two: the “definitely read” pile and the “maybe read” pile.
In Task 2, there was a section on Choosing the Best Publications. Review that section.

• Get rid of any articles that you cannot read because you don’t know the language or that don’t talk about specific experiments. You will use theoretical articles later, but not for this project.
• Get rid of any articles that are not really about your process. Sometimes the name of your process or sub-process shows up but the article is about something else.

Now check each source to decide whether it goes in the “definitely read” pile or the “maybe read” pile.

• Put into the “maybe read” pile sources where the authors are not using the same approach or discipline as you are. If they are not experimental studies and not in Psychology, then they go into the maybe pile. The name of the journal and the departmental affiliations of the authors will be useful clues: if you are doing an experiment in Cognitive Psychology, journals from psychiatry or neuropsychology will usually be “maybes”. Authors from different departments will usually be “maybes”, too.
• Put into the “definitely read” pile sources that have your process or sub-process and any of your factors in the title or the abstract. If you see the same author on several articles, then mark those articles “read first”.
• Put into the “maybe read” pile anything else. Now you have five piles and each pile has a “definitely read” part and a “maybe read” part.

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If any of your piles are empty or have nothing in the “definitely read” part,
then go back to the library and look for more.

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If you still have a hard time finding sources, then consider changing to a different research problem.
Your plan now is simple:
Don’t even think of working on the “maybe read” sources until you have finished all of the “definitely read” sources. Read this topic next: Develop a reading strategy.

[Karina]

link to read this topic next: develop a reading strategy is not hyperlinked.

[Mike Dillinger, PhD]

Thanks! It is now.

[Michelle Woo]

Is anyone else having issues with trying to get text from psycinfo? The little get text button isn't working for me.