The information retrieval model used to organize the resources presented in the set of social science subject guides is derived from an analysis of the scholarly communication system that serves researchers, practitioners, instructors and students who retrieve publications that are part of the knowledge apparatus of the social sciences in general and of specific social science disciplines in particular. 

Public communication within a social science discipline is the scope of the model described here.  That is important to state because not all scholar-to-scholar communication is public; some of it is private, between one researcher and another.  However, the scope of this model is that communication which is accessible to anyone who is able to locate it either online or through an academic library's collection of resources.  The model developed here attempts to deal with all forms of information/knowledge distribution that are used by a discipline to insure that those who are interested in keeping up with the scholarly dialog in a discipline's "commons" have efficient and effective ways of doing it.

Based on several different strains of research and model-building work done in library science and information science during the 1960's and 1970's, a sequential model of the scholarly communication system developed that led us to view published disciplinary literature as a physical correlate of the discipline's knowledge base.  In other words, what the members of a discipline "knew," collectively, was thought to be tantamount to what was published or recorded (printed, and cited or "used") in various formats of disciplinary literature.  All the journal literature, all of the research reviews, all of the handbooks and textbooks and encyclopedic treatments of a topic--that literature, that "official" recorded transcript, is defined as that discipline's knowledge base.

We bring this sequential, longitudinal model of scholarly communication to your attention because it describes the step-by-step process of filtering, refinement and restatement that identifies various levels or stages in the movement of a new research idea into and through a discipline's scholarly communication system. 

Cumulation:  The kind of developmental change that describes movement of a new idea into and through the discipline's knowledge domain is the concept of cumulation, or the metamorphosis of separate research findings, over time, into a more compacted, summarized "statement" of theory.  Were this compaction process not the case, we would be overwhelmed with a sea of past sources of information that we would still have to contend with; the detail of every single earlier research report that had ever been written would be our responsibility, never just keeping up with the summarized, shorter, more compact restatements of what is known. 

All of that is by way of saying that new research enters a discipline's intellectual "commons" (its public, shared communications system) in an attempt to make a place for itself among the other still-valid, still-entertained theories of how things work.  But over time no one (well, very very few) actually returns to the original research report to read it there.  Cognitive dissonance, plate tectonics, or bipolar-ism: all are examples of theories or concepts that are used by scholars today in different areas; and most of those scholars using those concepts haven't needed to actually go back to the original research reports into those ideas to trace the development of the idea into the mainstream of a discipline's knowledge base today.  There are other, more cumulated, convenient forms of literature available to do that for the scholar.

Following this process--from the initiation of a new research contribution to its final compaction in a later, shorter statement of "what is known" in an area--is a useful way of identifying the forms or stages of scholarly communication (literature) that one must know about.

Scholarly Communication Stages

Our model of scholarly communication begins at the point that a research who has completed a study wishes to present his findings and conclusions to colleagues in the discipline.  First, the research must be reported to the discipline: 

The Research Report Stage: New Information.  Hoping to be able to find that his theory is supported by the data collected and analyzed, the researcher must write a report that lays out, in quite specific methodological detail, exactly what took place and what the results here. Generally this research report is submitted to a scholarly or research journal with the hope that it will be accepted for publication.

Of course, there are other standard ways in which this same researcher could have attempted to get his research findings shared with his colleagues.  The researcher might be a graduate student in an academic degree program that requires the submission of a master's thesis or a doctoral dissertation; or the researcher might be employed by a company that issues reports of its own institutional research. 

Finally, the researcher may be working in a discipline that allows research to be first published in a more "book-like" format: a monograph.  A monograph is a separate publication (like a "book" as opposed to a "serial" publication like a journal), but it is aimed at a very narrow audience of specialists.  Monographs are not best sellers; and in terms of length, they are, if you will, bigger than a journal article, and shorter than a typical trade book.

Although books are not typically thought of by scholars as being first reports of research, we are going to include the book in this category.  A book may, indeed, be a summarization of several articles written previously by an author, or it may be an overview of a number of earlier research publications, intended to cumulate the findings of those separate pieces into a new, interwoven theory that brings disparate, separate streams of research evidence together.  In any event, something published in a trade book format may straddle the fence between new information and the cumulation of others' research findings and theoretical expressions.

Statements about "What is Known:" Knowledge.  There are other forms of publication that stress synthesis, summarization and generalization.  These forms move away from separate research report findings and concentrate on fitting all of the research evidence together into a cohesive whole.  Short on exceptions, caveats and assumptions, literature at this higher stage makes statements about what the authors think is known.  Very authoritative statements are make at this level of scholarly literature. 

Examples of literature at this level are collections of "exemplary" articles (essay collections), handbooks, textbooks, and short, encyclopedic articles about concepts or topics. 

While the model above describes fairly well how an idea gets into and through a discipline's intellectual commons (its literature), it does not assist those who are outside of the system with very many clues about how to find something about a particular topic or a process or a concept hidden within its literature.  That assistance system is added next:

Parallel Bibliographic Apparatus for Scholarly Communication

For retrieval purposes, it is not enough for us to know what the categories are in the apparatus we call a discipline's literature--its books, its monographs, its journal literature, and its handbooks, textbooks, and essay collections.  We also depend on an external "finding" apparatus that points out to us where information is located in the literature system itself.  That "pointing" system apparatus is called bibliography.

Indeed, the essential feature of the subject guides developed for your retrieval use in the social sciences is the organization of bibliographic finding aids that correspond to each of the essential levels of the disciplinary literature system.  Interestingly, just like the literature, the bibliographic finding tools can be divided into two levels or stages that exactly parallel the literature.

Selective level: The upper level of bibliography contains tools that make "best literature" selections for the searcher.  Like the knowledge formats found in the literature category to which it is parallel (textbooks, handbooks, essay collections), this category of bibliography contains research bibliographies, subject bibliographies, selective bibliographies which are also called didactic bibliographies, and subject directories.  Like the upper literature category, summarization, generalization and selection are the operational principles. Judgments are make by authorities at this top level of literature and bibliography; we, the readers, are told what is best by eminent scholars and subject respected experts.

Comprehensive level: At this initial stage--parallel to the research front in the literature system--we find bibliographic tools that excel on the side of completeness.  These tools seek to bring everything just published to the attention of their users; they are not interested in making selections of "better" materials for their users.  Indeed, the word "comprehensive" might be replaced by the word "exhaustive," in the sense that everything that is identified as existing is added to the bibliography.  Worth of content doesn't enter the picture, and selection isn't therefore a word that we apply to these tools.  If it is known to exist, and in on the subject, it is added to the bibliography.

How this retrieval model differs from most is that it stresses, at the top level, those forms of disciplinary literature (content) and finding aids (bibliography) that are authoritative, summarized and selective statements about "what is known" and what is best. 

So, our four-cell retrieval model places in its top row those disciplinary summarizing and generalizing sources that attempt to stand back and make authoritative decisions for the user about what is good, better, and best in the intellectual give-and-take of a discipline's literature.  We admonish you, the user, to take a very careful look at the resources on the bibliographic (right) side of the top layer first: find the authoritative advise of scholars and subject experts first, who will lead you to the best resources to consult on a topic.  And find the encyclopedic resources to consult on a topic or a concept or a theory.  If there are handbooks, know about them.  Locate good, recent textbooks and histories before diving into the research reports.

And what about Data?

While we have, so far, developed a useful model of scholarly communication, and lined up with it a model of the bibliographic apparatus that supports a searcher's retrieval from it, we have yet to develop one final, added component to the four-cell model of Literature/Bibliography and Information/Knowledge.  That component is a Data layer.

Data, if you will, is a lower, less structured category in a three-part system of data, then information, then knowledge:

Data are used in the creation of information; and information is used in the creation of what we are labeling as disciplinary knowledge. 

To make the category of Data useful for our retrieval-focused model of scholarly communication, we are going to expand Data to include a near synonym--Facts.  Isolated facts are data points, of course, but we wish to add the word "facts" to this category because it assists the user of the model in realizing how broad the category is.  So, we are not just thinking of data in the sense of observations in a research study; we are thinking of data in the sense of all of those other meanings of factual information--all of those library tools we call reference books, tools organized to allow a user to quickly look up facts about some thing or some person or some organization.

If you will, the category we are going to add to the 4-cell scholarly communication model is the category of Reference Tools--those tools that organize access to facts about some category of things.  We are thinking about almanacs and dictionaries, directories of addresses and other facts about people and institutions and organizations, statistical compendia, manuals of facts, and so forth.  Indeed, if you think about it, we are including in this added Reference Tools category every reference tool in existence . . . with the exception of tools that are bibliographic in nature.  Those tools have already been placed next to the level of disciplinary content they support: new research/informational or summarizing/knowledge level.

For those who believe we may have been tampering with the definitions in order to make things fit, let us assure you that bibliographic tools do comprise a category of finding aid that differs, in an important way, from other reference tools.  Indeed, all of the tools we place in the Reference Tools layer are indivisible into literature and bibliographic components.  In the Information layer, one may go to a bibliographic tool (say, a library catalog) to be pointed to a particular book or monograph held by that library.  In other words, one consults a bibliographic tool on the right side of the 4-cell model in order to find out what particular pieces of literature exist on the left side of that layer.

That is not the case with the tools that we place in the new Reference Tools level.  In that case alone, the pointing to final location of information is found in the same tool.  One "looks up" a word in the dictionary . . . and reads its definition right there.  The content is placed beneath or next to each index entry, which is arranged in some consistent manner throughout the tool (alphabetically, geographically, in rank order, etc.).  

To repeat, the Reference Tools can not be divided into a left (content) and right (bibliographic) side.  That is because reference materials, internal to their organization and format, are both content and a finding aid to that content.  Directories contain both the content (each entry or record) and the finding aid (the organization of the directory alphabetically by last name of the individual).