Introduction to Knowledge-level Content

If you recall, the "upper" level of Content in the model we are using is the summarizing, reworked literature that makes pronouncements about "what is known" in a discipline's content area or areas.  These aren't the first-level research findings that constantly appear in the discipline's scholarly research literature; these are summaries that continually update what is known, making sure that the research literature has been "sifted" through to ascertain what is relevant today, and how past assessments of "what is known" are thereby changed.

Encyclopedic Treatments, Textbooks and Histories, Handbooks, and Research Reviews

1.  Encyclopedia article treatments of a topic within the discipline

Discipline-oriented encyclopedias are written and edited by scholars in an area who have the academic credentials to "speak for the discipline."  While the articles run shorter than other summary forms of  disciplinary knowledge (textbooks, for example, or histories), they are excellent resources for those readers who are either outside of the area or students who are just gaining a foothold in the area's concepts, theories, and original research literature.

In interesting recent history of the social sciences is given by studying the scope and treatment of the three editions of the encyclopedia of the social sciences.  In the 1930's, the set was called the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.  A good deal of its content was biographical and descriptive.  In the 1960's it was renamed the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.  Its content was much less biographical, and much more methodological.  Research methods, and statistical procedures were stressed.  Recently, just after the turn of the century (2001), a new version of this encyclopedic set appeared, this time in both a print and an online version.  But, its content changed too, as is reflected by its most recent title, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (IESBS).

You will find it instructive to read an IESBS article just to see how good its coverage is, and how helpful each article's attendant bibliography is.  We are going to give you a demonstration of how you will ask OU Libraries to scan an article out of the 2001 IESBS for you and make it available to you.

2.  Textbooks & Histories

Lengthier summarizations of the knowledge of an area ("what is known") are presented via textbooks and histories.  Recent textbooks are excellent resources for the users of our subject guides to know about.  They represent what the authors feel are the most important things to say to students of a discipline about that discipline's subject areas, its history, its fundamental concepts and methodologies, and a summary of what the discipline "knows" at that point in time. 

Over the years it will be difficult for us to keep our separate subject guides up to date on mentioning a well selected list of the most popular textbooks in a discipline.  However, we have found an online resource that does a fairly good job of letting you know what the most popular textbooks are on an area-by-area basis: Amazon's New & Used Textbooks.  If you look on the left side of the page, you should see a menu that looks like this:

Under that area there is access to pages covering specific social science disciplines (see last item in the list, Social Sciences, and although not all of them are included in Amazon's current classification of the social sciences, some of them are covered.

If the link above doesn't get you to the Amazon page that contains new and used textbooks, there is another way:

1.  Go to the "Books" tab in Amazon, and click on the Browse Subjects sub-tab below it:

There, on that page, below the two-column list of Amazon "Subjects" is the link to New & Used Textbooks:

Other sources of best textbooks are going to be found by searching through guides to the literature and didactic bibliography.               . 

3.  Handbooks

Handbooks are another form of knowledge summarization, this one written not for novices (students) as much as other scholars working in the area, and for graduate students in the area.  While a textbook takes greater pains to write at a level that is understandable by the reader--the undergraduate student--the handbook excels at outlining "what is going on" is each of the subdivisions of a discipline.  While the encyclopedia and the textbook are more readable by "outsiders" of the discipline's subject area, the handbook is probably best considered to be a compendium of background information necessary for another scholar to quickly get him- or herself current with a related sub-area of the discipline.  As Thelma Freides says,  one thing that a scholarly area attempts to do from time to time is pause and "take stock" of where it is (in terms of its research findings) and where it needs to be going.  In an attempt to do that, the discipline attempts.

...to divide the field of study into its principal component subjects and to set down for each an account of the status of research in the area.  This would include the major findings of research and the conclusions which have been based on those findings, the concepts current in the field, and how and by whom they were developed, the over-all direction of research and its prospects.  Such an undertaking is usually organized by an eminent scholar in the discipline, who calls on specialists in the various subdivisions to contribute accounts of research in their area of specialization.  The resulting publication is usually a book with the "handbook" somewhere in its title (e.g., Handbook of Modern Sociology).

--Thelma Freides, "Handbooks," (pdf) in Literature and Bibliography of the Social Sciences, p 7.

Two examples of general social science handbooks or these titles about research and methodology:

Bouma, Gary D. and G. B. Atkinson.  A Handbook of Social Science Research.  New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Miller, Delvert C.  Handbook of Research Design and Social Measurement.  5th ed.  New York: Longman, 1991.

4.  Research Reviews

Research Reviews are called a lot of things in the literature: review article, literature review, bibliographic essay, or annual review.  Don't let the different phraseology confuse you, though: they are all, at their best, resources written by scholars that attempt to sort out the best and better in research results from the rest.  They are, if you will, the alternative means of access to the few scholarly/research articles that are catching the collective attention of the rest of the discipline's community of scholars. 

We view this category as the alternative resource to the rather pro forma searching of abstracting & indexing services that many academic librarians seem to channel their patrons into without giving it any thought.  Undergraduates, in particular, who have no knowledge of which articles have been "accepted" by the scholars of a discipline, are dutifully sent by librarians to a comprehensive, recurrent bibliography (say, Sociological Abstracts) to "find" something on a particular topic or theory or concept--not knowing what the discipline, collectively, has already said about that journal article or this journal article.  It would be much better to let the student know that scholars from the discipline have laid out what they believe are the best, most promising pieces of research in some area or another.  Laying those judgments down is what takes place in research reviews. 

There are different traditions in each of the disciplines about how this literature gets presented and is or isn't organized.  In some disciplines, it is simply up to the individual researchers to decide to take on the responsibility of writing articles that lay out which researchers have been making good contributions to the area, what their results indicate, and what questions remain to be taken up.  These articles appear in the regular scholarly journal literature, and the periodical indexing services and comprehensive, recurrent bibliographic resources need to be searched in order to find them.  As an example, a History student might search through American: History and Life, or Historical Abstracts to locate reviews of particular works by an author. Or, others in education and sychology might use Psychological Abstracts or ERIC to find out if there is a literature review or a bibliographic essay or a review article on some author, or more likely, on some topic.

The other two standard formats in which librarians expect to find these research review articles is in publications we call annual reviews, or in journals that specialize in offering up this reviewing mechanism, such as Contemporary Psychology.  Until the end of 2004, the journal Contemporary Psychology, with a subtitle of "APA Review of Books," was a resource that gave it readers this information in its description:

Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books contains critical reviews of books, films, tapes, and other media relevant to psychology. Material reviewed is intended to present a cross-section of psychological literature suitable for a broad readership of scholars in psychology. All reviews are written by invitation.

At the end of 2004, though, the APA began publishing an online version (called PsycCRITIQUES).  This reviewing resource replaced Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, "providing major enhancements, very current reviews, and much more content, including a 10 year backfile. In each weekly release, PsycCRITIQUES delivers approximately 15 reviews of psychological books, most from the current copyright year."

The most prized service, though, is the previously mentioned annual reviewing mechanism.  Published annually, these volumes are typically a large set of individually-written reviews, covering a standard set of repeating topics each year.  In fact, if an annual reviewing mechanism exists for a discipline, it is imperative that graduate students know about it.  It is, simply, the very best way for the novice disciplinarian to find out what has been taking place in some topical or methodological sub-area within a discipline.

OU Libraries has access to a set of annual reviews that are published by one publisher, Annual Reviews.  There are 29 subject areas covered by these annual reviews, but unfortunately they are mostly in the pure, physical and biological sciences:

Full text access to 29 Annual Reviews publications: Anthropology, Biochemistry, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Biomedical Engineering, Biophysics & Biomolecular Structure, Energy & the Environment, Cell & Developmental Biology, Immunology, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Medicine, Ecology & Systematics, Nutrition, Entomology, Fluid Mechanics, Genetics, Genomics & Human Genetics, Materials Research, Microbiology, Neuroscience, Nuclear & Particle Science, Pharmacology & Toxicology, Physical Chemistry, Physiology, Phytopathology, Plant Physiology, Political Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology.

The areas that are related to the social sciences that are listed above are:

• Anthropology

• Earth & Planetary Sciences (useful for geographic content)

• Ecology & Systematics (environment and resources)

• Political Science

• Psychology

• Public Health

• Sociology

:As an example of how the whole set of annual reviews might be used online (through OU Libraries authenticated access to it), one can access the service through LORA's set of databases, looking for the entry Annual Reviews.  Once in, if you do a search on some social science terminology (we used "leadership") in its "Full Text" mode, you can find all annual review articles in its database that contain that word or phrase somewhere in each article's text.

As we say, we tried the term "leadership" and allowed the system to find all articles that contained that word.  The system returned with 45 citations for me, most coming from the annual reviews of Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, and Public Health.  As you will see, another great feature of this service is that the user has access to the full text of the annual review "chapter" online.

A special tool needs to be mentioned before stopping here: Mental Measurements Yearbook

Buros, Oscar Kristen, ed. Mental Measurements Yearbook.  1938- Irregular.

This set gives evaluative reviews for psychological and educational tests. These critical reviews are written by professionals, and many include bibliographies.  OU has an online version of the most recent Mental Measurements Yearbook available as one of its LORA services, so if you are willing to learn the interface system used by its vendor (SilverPlatter uses what they call their WebSPIRS interface) you can locate descriptions and reviews of psychological tests here.