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Session 6: Scholarly Communication Model of Social Science Content and Finding Aids
Part II: An Introduction We now leave the unit comprised of the first 5 content sessions of the course and enter the second unit, comprising another 5 sessions (Sessions 6 - 10). The first five content sessions were about those general searching tools and techniques that are almost universally applicable to later, more specialized searching. You needed to be introduced to Web search engines and metasearch engines, general and academically-specialized subject directories, online reference services, and the controlled vocabulary and classification that academic libraries use to organize their resources to your use. Finally, in that same first unit, we introduced you to the ways in which you can verify the existence of a scholarly item and initiate the process of gaining access to either the physical item itself, or more likely, a digital facsimile of some portion of it. Now, however, we have to move you into the more specialized world of the material written by and for scholars in the social sciences. That view will cover the initial reports of the research findings themselves (reports, dissertations and theses, journal articles, monographs and books) as well as those later types of publication that comment about the initial research findings and finally those forms of literature that attempt to synthesize and summarize a lot of research results into a later, up-to-date statement about "what is known" in some topical area. To do that, we shall use a model of the communication process among scholars who attempt to keep one another alert to what is "new" in their knowledge domain. An Expanded Version of the Garvey/Griffith Model of Scientific Communication The original model of scientific communication that is in use today is usually attributed to Garvey and Griffiths' work in the 1970s. Their model followed the origination of a piece of new research through the steps in the stages of the scientific communication process: the methods used by both the researchers to share their research findings with their larger community of scientific colleagues, and for other entities (such as publishers of bibliographic tools) to offer finding methods by which other scientists could search for, and find, a particular piece of research. See Note 1 for citations to Garvey and Griffiths' work on this model in the 1970s.
Following is a modified rendition of the Garvey/Griffith scientific communication model (the central column of light blue boxes in the graphic below) that was augmented by Julie M Hurd to include "modes of access" (the left-side and right-side columns that were not mentioned in the original Garvey/Griffith model). See Note 2 for citations to this 1990's work.
The "stages" that a research/author goes through in the introduction of a research finding into the "literature" of a discipline is shown in the central (light blue) column of the model below, from the bottom (start), up through the top (end of process):
Informal Component of the Modified Model of Scientific Communication As you can see, along the way from the initiation of a piece of research up through its "end" (the citation and discussion by authors of monographs and/or books), there are lots of possibilities of other, less formal means of scientific communication (left-side column in yellow) that can also (and usually do) take place, early in the whole process, just after the initiation of, and concomitant with, the research:
Those two columns (the main, central light blue column of formal scientific communication forms, and the left-side informal communication devises used by researchers/authors early in the process of completing a piece of research) constitute what we think of the content part of the research findings dissemination process. Using both informal and formal communication techniques, scientific disciplines have systems that allow new ideas to get a moment "on stage" in front of the discipline's community of scholars, from colleagues and acquaintances (informal communication techniques) to other disciplinary and/or professional peers (formal communication devices). Most interesting, from an information studies point of view, are the items or devices in the right-side column (the orange colored boxes). These items are the bibliographic tools that, in Hurd's augmentation of the original Garvey/Griffith model, scientists use to gain access into the literature found in the central (light blue) column. Bibliographic Component of the Modified Model of Scientific Communication
Salient Features of the Modified Model of Scientific Communication There are three special features of the Hurd-modified Garvey/Griffith model introduced to you above that are important to think about. First of all, the formal research process moves naturally from one form of documentation to another in a certain, almost inviolate, order: from researcher's manuscript to journal article to discussion of the article by other articles and by reviewing literature, and finally the ideas and findings of the article are either integrated into the larger, more synthesizing forms of literature (a monograph, or a book) or they are not. Second, at the beginning of this scientific communication process, there are a number of informal communication techniques used to communicate the findings: communication strategies, like symposia and conference presentations, where feedback can to quickly and effectively elicited by which the researcher to "tweak" the manuscript before it is submitted for publication in a scientific journal. And last, there is a system of bibliographic tools that can be shown to work as the scientific community's "route of access" back into the corpus of literature that in coming into existence, and which already exists. It is not by chance that these three features equate to the three side-by-side "paths" outlined in the model shown above. There is a component that involves informal communication strategies at the beginning of the research dissemination process, and there is a component that involves a sort of "helping" system of bibliographic tools to allow the community of scholars to locate ideas within the long, continuous flow shown in the center column of scientific communication. Next Step: The Freides Model of Social Science Literature and Bibliography Contemporaneous with Garvey and Griffith in the 1970's was the work of Thelma Freides, a professor of library and information science at Amory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Freides' major work is a book called Literature and Bibliography of the Social Sciences. Her model of social science scholarly communication differed in several significant ways from the Garvey/Griffith model. First, she was interested in the process of assisting users of that scientific literature: students of the social sciences, other academics outside of a social science discipline, etc. Second, she was, as a professor of library and information science, focusing on the formal (published, recorded) communication that takes place among the scholars who work in a particular social science discipline. Finally, she was interested in laying out a technique that academic librarians could use to both understand how scholars within a discipline view their own disciplinary literature, and to assist scholars and others outside the bounds of the discipline get access to the literature that best fit their needs--according to their backgrounds, their knowledge of the concepts and principles and methods of a discipline, etc. To do these things, Freides build she own model of the social science communication system (as we say, a system of published--formal--communication) and constructed next to it a parallel system of bibliographic "finding" devises that could be used by scholars (or students, or scholars outside the area of the discipline) to locate what they needed from the literature of a social science discipline. Her 1975 book, Literature and Bibliograpaphy of the Social Sciences, was written for both students of library and information science as well as students within the social sciences. Particularly interesting is Freides' guiding thesis: that bibliographic tools (indexes, abstracting services, retrospective bibliographies, etc.) can actually be conceptualized as fitting into a system of helping tools that are analogous (and parallel) to the various forms of literature that each bibliographic form attempts to explicate or point its readers to. Freides partitioned the social science literature (and the bibliographic tools which attempt to assist users get access into the literature into various levels), starting at the unintegrated, unorganized initial stage of ideas attempting to enter into a discipline's knowledge base (scholarly journal articles) through several stages of cumulation of those initial, new ideas into a collective, reworked statement of "what is known" in a discipline. Social Science Literature, According to Freides Research Reports: Moving from bottom to top on the left (Literature) side of the following schematic of Freides' model, one can see that the starting category of literature is what Freides calls the Research Report. This functional type of literature is where new ideas enter into the "intellectual commons" of the social science discipline's collective scholarly consciousness: ideas are presented that hypothesize, then test, then draw conclusions, then suggest how thinking in the discipline's knowledge base needs to be changed (or not) to incorporate the results of this new piece of information. Cumulating Publications I: Next up the scale of larger, broader restatements of scope come what Freides calls the first level of cumulating publications: research reviews and handbooks. These are the first publications that attempt to determine if brand new research findings agree or disagree with previous research results. They ask if the new research reports "confirm and extend what was already known, or do they suggest defects in existing theories?" (Freides, 73) Cumulating Publications II: At the top of the Literature column are the publications that have waited "for the dust to settle" in the skirmish for acceptance into the every-revised restatement of "what is known" about some topic or concept of methodology in the discipline. These publications, all of them in book form, are essay collections, textbooks, histories, and encyclopedic articles.
Social Science Bibliography, According to Freides The bibliographic "side" of the Freides model of social science literature and bibliography has, not three categories, but four categories. Don't let this ordinal difference detract you though, because the bibliographic column also moves from unintegrated lists of "everything" at the bottom, to highly selective lists of "the best" at the top. The most important principle to understand is Freides' attempt to organize the bibliographic tools in the same process she saw going on this the progression of literature types, from the single, unintegrated entry point of a new research report into a discipline's scholarly journal literature through an idea's integration into those periodic restatements of "what is known." Disciplinary/Multidisciplinary Bibliography: For the bibliographic apparatus, that similar process begins with a new journal articles (as well as books and dissertations) appearance as a citation in those constantly-updated (recurrent) bibliographic tools we call disciplinary indexing services (Psychological Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, Historical Abstracts, etc.) Library-Generated Bibliography: Two very standard tools or tool types that students know about are library catalogs and periodical indexing services. Periodical indexing services are listed under library-generated bibliography by Freides because periodical indexing services are produced by publishers to be sold to, and used by, libraries; individuals do not purchase periodical indexing services as they would (and do) purchase abstracting services. Indeed, many students, who use abstracting services in libraries, do not realize that abstracting services are typically published on a monthly basis, to be distributed to scholars in a disciplinary area who wish to read through the whole issue of the abstracting service in order to "keep up with" the literature of the field. However, back to library catalogs. At the time Freides wrote her book (the 1970's) it was still the case that one could not typically inspect the catalog of a library without traveling to that library, wherever it was located. The principle exception to that general rule was the consultation of "book" catalogs issued for very special library collections. In other words, it used to be the case that catalogs of extraordinarily important libraries were printed and distributed as huge, multi-volume sets of books. One such library catalog that was particularly important to the social sciences was the published library catalog called the London Bibliography of the Social Sciences, first published in 1931. This set listed catalog records of the books in several large social science collections in London. Today, of course, we have less need for these book catalogs because we all have virtual access to the catalogs of thousands and thousands of library catalogs around the country and around the world through the Internet. The other particularly important type of bibliographic tool in this category is the periodical indexing service. This is still probably the most frequently used means of accessing scholarly literature in academic libraries. Altough Freides didn't not divide them into three subcategories or levels, we are going to:
Selective Recurrent Bibliography: The sense of selective recurrent is an ongoing record of not everything being published, but the better materials being published. Not every book that is published is reviewed by others, and not every book that is published is included in recurrent lists of "new" materials that the reader should know about. In other words, we are now at the stage in the bibliographic apparatus for the social sciences that assessments of quality are taking place, and the publishers of these bibliographic devises are allowing their compilers and editors to select materials that should be mentioned, leaving the others out. The first type of selective recurrent bibliography, current awareness lists, are bibliographic tools that put just a little information about new monographs and books in front of their readers. They are devices that do nothing but alert their readers to the fact that there is a new book just published about some particular topic. Individual book reviews, of course, "alert" scholars to new books as well, but they do so by also included an assessment of the worth of the book: they evaluate the book being reviewed, while the current awareness list doesn't. As you will see, finding book reviews is not always a straight-forward process for later look-up: in most instances they are located in the journal mechanism itself, along with the substantive research articles which are the prime motivation for a journal's publication. You see, most scholars who subscribe to a journal wish to see, on the same recurring which brings them the new research articles they wish to read, the reviews of new books of interest to those who work in the field. Retrospective Bibliography: Retrospective bibliographies are one-time publications, as opposed to every form of bibliography that has been mentioned so far, all of them being forms of recurrent bibliography. A major form of retrospective bibliography, according to Freides, is the research-oriented bibliography, whose intent is to "open new routes to the literature. They list materials omitted by the ongoing bibliographic tools, or present the literature in relation to an idea or point of view which is not otherwise accessible." (Freides 207) Another form of research-oriented bibliography is the "didactic" or teaching bibliography which attempts to summarize what is thought to be known as opposed to pointing the way to the creation of new knowledge, as the research-oriented bibliography does. Didactic bibliography aids "the reader in selecting from a plethora of available materials." (Freides 231) As Freides points out, most of us, as users of the literature of the social sciences, are attempting to learn not what is new but what scholars in the area already know. That finding process is greatly assisted through didactic bibliography. Freides finally makes the point that although didactic bibliography tells you what to read on a certain subject, a guide to the literature tells you how to find out what to read. Broader, and even more generally instructive than a didactic bibliography, a guide to the literature can offer information about the how's of research into a discipline as well as the bibliographic what's and types of literature what's. If you will, we view the guide to the literature as almost a parallel form of why a student goes to an encyclopedia in the literature: to find out what the topic is about, what its main conceptual points are, and what the best resources are (textbooks, histories, scholarly journals, main authors; research-oriented bibliographies, disciplinary bibliographies, . . .) to be used in exploring the topic further. Here, then, is a more completely populated version of the Freides model of social science scholarly communication (and bibliographic helping system):
A Final Relabeling and Reduction of the Freides Model We have just one last modification (a reduction) to make to the Freides model before introducing you to it for your use this semester: instead of forcing you to try to keep in mind the close to 20 cells in the full Freides model pictured above, we are going to point out the essential functional similarity of several subsets of her literature and bibliographic tool types, and combine and relabel those subsets into a much smaller set of 4 super-cells. Three changes have to be made to Freides' original work which was done in the 1970s. First of all, we need to include virtually-available resources (both "literature" and "bibliography") into the mix, because Freides' book was written before the appearance of the rash of new forms and formats we have available to us today, after the introduction and growth of the connectivity and digitalization available to scholars now. We live in a world of scholarly connectivity, using email and the Web to make connections to individuals and to libraries and to online versions of documents that Freides had no idea about in the 1970's. Second, we need to simplify the basic structure of the vertical classification into two--just two--categories: information and knowledge. The lower half of each "side" (literature and bibliography) of the model should re labeled as information: the grist of the knowledge domain. Information is the "new" stuff; the research that has just been carried out and delivered to the community of scholars. On the bibliographic side, it is the abstracting and indexing services, as well as the bibliographic lists, like current awareness services, which point back to the new information (the articles, the monographs, the reports, the books). Third, we need to update the terminology used by Freides to reflect the new, digital/connectivity age: we will use "content" instead of "literature" in order to facilitate the allowance of other non-traditionally "published" formats to be included in our scheme of things, and we need to search out and add the new digital and online media to our list of formats to be included.
The summary organization shown above is the structure of a set of subject guides (read, again, the definition of guides to the literature given above, because that definition relates what these subject guides are to do for you) that have been produced for you use in the rest of this course. You will find them on the lower halves of both the . . . There are 16 subject guides, one for the General Social Science Resources, and eight for the various traditionally-named social science disciplines (Anthropology, Communication, Economics, Geography, History, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology), five for the major professional practice areas related to the social sciences (Business, Education, Journalism, Law and Justice, Public Administration) and two major multi- and interdisciplinary areas (International Relations, Leadership) of special interest to OU graduate students taking degree programs in these areas. One thing you will find in these subject guides is a high percentage of citations to printed resources. The reason there are so many print resources found in these subject guides is because they are, when listed, the best resources to list. In other words, we will not sacrifice excellence for easy availability (versus an inferior online, easily accessible resource). If, for example, the only excellent encyclopedic resource in Psychology is available as a printed volume, that is the volume that will be listed in the subject guide. Excellence and ease-of-access are not interchangeable criteria, and ease-of-access was not a consideration as a criterion at all.
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