Group Notes for Facebook Lit.

Review

Audience: Who tends to be reading them?

- Scholarly people who are “highly motivated”
- Specialists in the field
- People (non-specialists) interested in the field
- (Grad) Students trying to understand a research field
- Business people
o Social media companies who have a research arm
- Teachers who work in that field
o Teaching African-American history, etc.
- Peer reviewers

Who is going to read it influences everything else (tone, citations, etc.)

Two scholars will be reading your literature review (Dr. Walker and another scholar)

Purpose: Why do people write them? Read them? What do they do as a genre?
- Point out gaps in/opportunities for research
- Research review
o Identify trends/patterns
o Tells us what’s known/unknown
- Origin of the research field
- Discusses specific researchers
o Identify major players, their findings, and methodology
- Categorize or create a reasoning structure
o In African-American History lit. review it’s chronological
o In Facebook lit. review it’s categorized by different ways people interact with
Facebook
o In Bird lit. review it’s categorized by the different methods used and introduces
new method

Style: Word choice, sentence complexity and length

- Not first person
o Subject is almost always the researcher or their findings
- Explanatory
- Monotone?
- Field-specific terminology

An academic discipline is ~ department on a campus

- Psychology
o Experimental psych
 o Ethical psych
o Etc.

Facebook lit. review is both psychology and digital communications

- First feature is the title
o Titles tend to be self-referential (“Facebook: A literature review”)
- Premises
o Context/background to the topic of research
 i.e. Facebook is popular around the world
o Significance of research field
 The writers do not care about Facebook specifically, but a lot of people
use it so it’s interesting to social scientists
o Definitions
o Proposition (usually two parts)
 Self-referential sentence
 “This article reviews…”
 Takeaway sentence or pattern found
 “The review clearly shows…much of the work done so far has
been fragmented…”
 You CANNOT know this until you’ve identified and analyzed
research
- Methodology
o How the lit. reviewers found the articles/research they used
- What is Facebook is a definition section
- Parallel series of “what” reasons
o What did they (the researchers) look at/investigate?
- Conclusion: future oriented
o Point out opportunities for future research
o Current implications of previous research
- This article uses subheads
o Use depends on discipline
- Citations
o It’s a heavily cited piece because the lit. review is based on research
 Almost every other/every third sentence

Reasons for a literature review

- Synthesize
o Put researchers and their findings in conversation with each other
 “A and B were among the first to…Later research would confirm…linked
these two studies…”
 Setting up a chronology within a subhead
 Makes sense because people build on previous research
 o In one sentence the writers of the review describe how the research was
conducted and what was found
o Synthesis is not listing
o Not necessarily agreement between studies; could be conflicting results
o Could compare research questions

How do you define a topic?

- Citation Chasing (aka Bibliography mining)
- Starting with Herz and doing a “backward chase”
o Everything in Herz’s bibliography is from before her book was published

Google Scholar
- Has a citation function. Use it.
- Also has “cited by” feature (forward chase)