Review Literature

Terminology, continued: this week's subject will send you off to look for summaries of research in the subfield to which your topic belongs. You will continue to develop the "cloud" of linked terms as you find more things to look at and read, and you'll need to become clear in your own mind what your topic really is, and ask yourself: what is the level of specificity? Can you alter that specificity, redefine the general to be more specific (that is, define a subpart that you'll concentrate on), or broaden to cover more cases and include a wider range of literature? You'll want to do such redefinitions in consultation with your faculty mentor.

Each search is part of a story, an epic of discovery, likely to be filled with surprises.

I thought I'd start this week by looking at an article that showed up two years ago in Science just before this point in the term, to make the general point that you can start anywhere and weave (tie?) an elegant and productive macramé of connections. The article that caught my eye as a starting place was Collapse and Conservation of Shark Populations in the Northwest Atlantic (Julia K. Baum, Ransom A. Myers, Daniel G. Kehler, Boris Worm, Shelton J. Harley, Penny A. Doherty Volume 299, Number 5605, Issue of 17 Jan 2003, pp. 389-392)
Daniel Kehler is the son of dear friends of mine, a PhD Biology student at Dalhousie, a person I've known since he was about 3 months old. I had no idea when I picked up the article that he was involved... serendipity, they say...)
This is a primary or research article, no doubt about it. The article presents an analysis of data ("We present an analysis of logbook data for the U.S. pelagic longline fleets targeting swordfish and tunas in the Northwest Atlantic..."), the primary criterion for 'primary'. It's a good example of the morphology of this kind of information, so let's look at its pieces:
  1. title --which tells what it's about, usually pretty literally (contrast to humanities, where titles are often metaphorical/allusive)
  2. authors, and their location(s) --essential information for other searches, as we'll see
  3. abstract --an art form, really
  4. introductory paragraph(s) --in which the pedigree of the research is disclosed, by reference to other articles and findings
  5. data, analysis --numbers, tables, graphs, images... and explanatory text, with procedures if an experiment
  6. summary --pointing toward further research, answering the "so what?" question
  7. references (and notes) --pedigree details, and (in some journal formats) expansions of what's in the text

For the moment I want to focus on the first paragraph of the article's text:

Human exploitation has propagated across land, coastal areas, and the ocean, transforming ecosystems through the elimination of many species, particularly large vertebrates (1, 2). Only in the past half century, as fishing fleets expanded rapidly in the open ocean, have large marine predators been subject to this intense exploitation. Many species, including tuna, billfishes (3), and sea turtles (4), are of immediate conservation concern as a result. Among the species impacted by these fisheries, sharks should be of particular concern. Despite their known vulnerability to overfishing (5, 6), sharks have been increasingly exploited in recent decades, both as bycatch in pelagic longline fisheries from the 1960s onward (7) and as targets in directed fisheries that expanded rapidly in the 1980s (8). The vast geographic scale of pelagic marine ecosystems constrains our ability to monitor shark populations adequately. Thus, the effect of exploitation on sharks has, for most populations, remained unknown (9). Shark management and conservation have been hindered by the lack of knowledge on their status or even the direction of the population trends.
Often (but not always) the first paragraph will point to one or more review articles, summaries of research on the broader subject of which the article is a detailed examination. In this case, the first reference (to Alroy 2001) is not a 'review' , but the second almost certainly is... so we need to take a look at its morphology:
What was natural in the coastal oceans? (Jeremy B. C. Jackson Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 98, Issue 10, 5411-5418, May 8, 2001)

The heading tells us that this is a "Colloquium Paper" --and the Colloquium turns out to have been on The Future of Evolution --more than one person in the class might find the paper by Mooney and Cleland The evolutionary impact of invasive species a useful source...)

Jackson 2001 has a hefty bibliography (an earmark of review articles), and at the bottom we find links to several citations by other authors. A search in Web of Science (which we'll look at in more detail shortly) reveals that the article has been cited by 41 subsequent authors, including Gell FR, Roberts CM Benefits beyond boundaries: the fishery effects of marine reserves TRENDS ECOL EVOL 18 (9): 448-455 SEP 2003, and DISTURBANCE TO MARINE BENTHIC HABITATS BY TRAWLING AND DREDGING: Implications for Marine Biodiversity (Simon F. Thrush and Paul K. Dayton Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 2002. 33:449-473) We are offered a link to "similar articles" in the same title, and the bibliography plunges us into 180+ items whose significance is summarized in the text of the article. This one has been cited by 10 subsequent authors since its publication.

One more thing about how the article in Science appears: look at the box on the right, which offers 'Search for similar articles' and 'Search for citing articles'. Such features are now common in many online resources, and provide enormous power. Think about how they work: the "similar articles" invokes some sort of algorithm that trolls an enormous database and finds... what? Overlapping terminology? Shared citations? It's different for each publisher or search engine, but it's one of those features that makes electronic access to scientific literatures vastly better than it was only a few years ago.

I see that there's a link to Web of Science, which lists 21 citers of the article

So your problem is: how to find analogous sources for YOUR topic? Several strategies to explore:
  1. find a primary article on the topic and mine its first paragraph and bibliography for candidates for a secondary/review article (what we've already done)
  2. search Annual Reviews with terms from your initial development of 'aboutness' for your topic, and find other Annual Review-type publications for the topic
  3. search other databases which seem to offer a way to LIMIT to 'review' (both Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and Web of Science have this feature)...

In short, one article leads to another... and soon there's an interconnected literature about a topic. That's the kind of thing you're going to build for your topic.

We have a brand new tool, RefWorks, that will make your lives MUCH easier, and that MAY turn out to be extremely valuable for managing the references you encounter in ALL your courses. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is automatic formatting of bibliographies, but it's really more important as a management tool. It lives at www.refworks.com, and you'll need to create an account, and log in each time you use it --but it will follow you wherever you go, and keep track of your accumulated references!

So we need to look at some search tools:

Of course, the question is whether we have a particular journal... and it can be answered in several ways:

  1. do a TITLE search in Annie for the journal to find out if we subscribe to or license access to the journal

  2. Look the journal up in the W&L Periodical Finder, which includes links to many journals that we don't own but can access in full text

  3. Ask me, if neither of the above produces the desired result --sometimes I can find things that others can't...

Another common problem is decoding a journal's abbreviation --and there's a link to help with that on the Science Library's main page (Journal Abbreviations).

For the moment I'll just mention the InterLibrary Loan service, which is the solution to the problem of getting materials we don't have. More later...