Errors of Judgement

1. Literature Review - Overview
2. Part One - Literature Survey
3. Literature Survey
4. Efficient Ways Of Searching The Literature
5. Where to Hunt
6. Other Useful Info
7. Citations And Notes
8. Errors Of Judgment
9. Planning Checklist

Two sins authors may commit when citing published sources are those of (a) overloading their review of the literature and (b) failing to keep complete, accurate bibliographic information, and then attempting to fill in missing information by guess.

Overloading a Literature Review

When a student’s plan for a project includes a chapter dedicated to a survey of the professional literature, some students - perhaps many - hate to leave out any item that they unearthed during their search. They feel it a shame to omit any reference that took them hours to locate and digest. They also believe that the more citations, the better. The longer their list of resources, the greater the chance that readers will credit them with being a thorough, painstaking scholar.

But such an approach may well give quite the opposite impression. Mindlessly including everything even remotely related to the research topic is apt to produce an ill-organized, puzzling conglomeration whose contribution to the project is difficult to imagine. If your supervising committee members are astute and careful in their assessment of your work, they will regard an overloaded review as evidence of incompetence.

You can avoid this error if you specify precisely what your review is intended to accomplish and then assiduously apply that intention as you select what to include and what to exclude. For example, if the purpose of the review is to locate your study within a relevant domain of literature, then you are obligated to (a) clearly define the nature of that domain by describing the criteria you use for determining what sorts of studies belong within that body of work and (b) show how your study meets those criteria - that is, explain how your work relates to the other theories and empirical investigations that you have found in the specified domain. Items from the literature that fail to meet your standards should be left out. Consequently, readers of your finished product should never be puzzled about the function that any of your literature references perform in your study.

Filling in by Guess

Accurately recording bibliographic information is not always a simple task when you are obliged to survey scores of books and periodicals while pressured by time and competing responsibilities. Thus, you may either neglect to record the source of a quotation or piece of information, or you may fail to include all elements of a source - the author’s initials, the year of publication, the location of the publishing company, or the page numbers for a chapter in a book of collected works. Thus, when preparing the final version of your bibliography, you can find yourself scurrying to the Internet or the campus library to retrieve the missing information. Your problem is compounded if the book you need has been checked out by another of the library’s clients or if the volume originally had been furnished to you by another university via the interlibrary-loan service. Under these conditions, students sometimes feel tempted to create the missing data by guess. They estimate what the author’s initials or the chapter page numbers might have been. They may rationalize this behavior by reasoning that "Nobody’s going to use my references to find the book" and "No one will discover what I’ve done, and it’s insignificant anyway."

There are at least two difficulties with thus yielding to temptation. First, the essence of research and scholarship is to be as truthful as possible. You expect the authors of the books and periodicals you read to be honest and as accurate as they know how. Therefore, as a scholar, you bear that same responsibility. Other people may, indeed, use your bibliography in their own search for resources, so they suffer whenever your citations are inaccurate.
Second, you may get caught at falsifying information. Some members of your faculty advisory committee are likely to be well acquainted with the body of literature from which you have drawn material included in your project. So when they review your list of references, they may spot items containing false information. These items are usually viewed as the result of carelessness, like typos and misspellings, and you will be asked to correct them. But readers may also suspect that you manufactured the erroneous material, and this makes them wonder about the accuracy of the entire thesis or dissertation. As a British colleague of ours warns his students: "The thirteenth stroke of the clock casts doubt not only on itself, but on the other twelve strokes as well." In sum, if your project is to make a proper contribution to the world of scholarship, it’s worth your time and energy to be as correct as possible in identifying the sources of material derived from your survey of the literature.