Summary literature : formalizing and archiving knowledge

textbooks | encyclopedias | handbooks | bibliographies | annual reviews

Description: Summary literature attempts to review and summarize the knowledge base of Sociology. Some of these works attempt to summarize comprehensively, as in the case of encyclopedias and most introductory textbooks; others collect reviews of selected research tracks or introduce the novice to specific areas of inquiry, as in the case of annual reviews and more narrowly-focused textbooks. Archives store, organize, and provide access to various collections of knowledge and data used by sociologists, their students, and others.

"One of the main reasons for writing the [literature] review is to make a proposal for the research you intend to do. This means that your review of the literature must provide a methodological rationalization for your research. You need, then, to demonstrate that you understand the history of your topic. The history is the assumptions and definitions other researchers have employed to study the topic. It is your responsibility to investigate this history in order to provide the story of how the topic was defined, established and developed."

-- Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a literature review: releasing
the social science research imagination. London : Sage. page 173.

Types of summary literature

Textbooks
Textbooks attempt to introduce the novice to new fields of study and broad areas of significant inquiry within them. They can provide an overview of the field, identifying major researchers, critical theories and concepts, historical trends and activities, and issues that were controversial at the time of publication.

Encyclopedias
General encyclopedias attempt to briefly summarize the entire body of human knowledge and will place sociological currents within this broad perspective. Subject encyclopedias do the same for the knowledge base of a single field of study.

Handbooks
Handbooks are guides to research and writing in the field. Typically, a handbook will include essays on the history, theory, and methods of sociology and its subdisciplines with each chapter being followed by a useful, often extensive bibliography of appropriate sources for further inquiry.

Bibliographies
Bibliographies are everywhere in research. Some are relatively short, provided as references to the report of a specific research project, others are book-length, typically organized by format, publication date, or other useful criterion, that attempt to identify all publication in the field over a specific period of time.

Annual reviews
Yearly publication of all the major research done in the field over the past year. Selecting research articles from the pages of the leading Sociology journals, these publications attempt to identify the most significant research trends in the field. Annual reviews make excellent starting points for literature reviews, the starting point of any research project.


STRENGTHS———
  • An excellent source of background or contextual material on the field generally or on a specific research focus
  • Typically accompanied by bibliographies pointing to further reading.
  • May also provide critical vocabularies for specific concepts and ideas that will be useful in performing further searches in disciplinary databases.

 

CONSIDERATIONS—
  • Many of these works concentrate on the "Big Picture" of Sociology : What is the scope and structure of the disciplinary knowledge base? What are its foundational concepts and theories? What are its major research themes? What have been the research interests over any period of years?
  • Provides a starting point for exploring in greater detail, usually in books and peer-reviewed literature; but it is not normally appropriate for reference in the bibliography of a research paper.

Examples of finding aids for summary literature in Sociology

Library Reference department
The Suzzallo and Odegaard Libraries' reference departments will each contain encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia of Sociology. Try a library catalog search under the subject heading "sociology--bibliography" for book-length bibliographies in the field.
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OCLC WorldCat >> UW only
Consists of catalog records and holdings information for material owned by libraries around the world.

Annual Review of Sociology UW only
Comprehensive, authoritative, and critical reviews written by the world's leading sociologists. According to the "Impact Factor" rankings of the Institute for Scientific Information's Science Citation Index, the Annual Review ranks at or near the top of its respective subject category.

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Use RefWorks to build your own bibliography of Sociology books >> UW only