Tracing the Scholarly Conversation

Library instruction for PHIL 09211 on how to trace the scholarly conversation on your topic.


Transcript follows below:

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An important part of writing a research paper on a topic is tracing the conversation that scholars have had with each other on this topic over time. As each book or article adds new knowledge about the topic, the experts who write them are responding to each other and building on each other’s work, continuing a conversation that has been ongoing for a while. There are several different ways you can trace that conversation and get an idea of how scholars have interacted with each other.

One good option is to look for literature reviews and citations in the most recent books and articles you’ve read on the topic. There may be a section, especially in articles, marked the “literature review,” where the author will briefly describe for you the arguments that other scholars have made on this topic; that’s an excellent resource for understanding the history of the topic. Or, if there isn’t a formal literature review, you can look at the sources that are cited in the article’s or chapter’s bibliography, references, footnotes, or endnotes. These make for a good map to other works that the author is quoting from or referring to. Examine all of your sources, and try to see if they cite each other, or if they’re citing other sources out there that you haven’t read yet, but that you might want to.

There are also specialized tools out there that can help you visualize the ways that articles are connected to each other. For example, there’s Connected Papers: connectedpapers.com Try putting in the title of one of your articles, let's try this one, and click on it if you find a match. The site will generate a dynamic visual map of articles that cite the paper and that it cites, and all their interconnections, which you can zoom in and move around and explore. At the left, you can also find the citations for the articles that are connected to the one you started with. This tool won’t necessarily work for every article – especially ones that don’t have many citations, for example – but if you have an article it does turn out to work for, it can be a really useful and visual way to explore your topic. There are a few other tools like this out there, too: try Googling “citation visualization” sometime and see what you can find!