Researching Politics and International Relations

I don’t like the phrase, ‘library-based research’. It implies that research either takes place in the library or somewhere else. That students can choose between undertaking their own fieldwork or spending time in the library reading the findings of others in books and journal articles. In reality all research is library-based. A research project involving three months studying the mating habits of a little-known dung beetle in the Amazon rain-forest is likely to be preceded by a similar, although probably longer, period in the library seeking to amass what is already known about dung beetles and their mating habits. The phrase also implies that carrying out research in the library simply involves reading the work of others, and cannot therefore lead to the development of something new. This underestimates the way in which new findings, theoretical models and conceptual clarification, can emerge from challenging existing thinking, but also ignores the extent to which libraries are no longer just repositories of already published work (if they ever were), but now provide access to a wide range of  information through advanced search engines, online databases, electronic archives as well as other archival and documentary collections.

All of which is largely a pretext designed to allow me to shoehorn into the blog a further extract from Kristin Luker’s Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences. When conducting research in what she, rather inelegantly, refers to as ‘the age of info-glut’, Luker argues somewhat more eloquently, that librarians are essential guides whom researchers ignore at their peril:

Librarians, along with pediatricians, are among the greatest human beings in the universe. One of my colleagues at Berkeley calls them the “pit bulls of democracy” – as our government increasingly tries to hide things from us, librarians are among the few souls fighting back. They love the thrill of the chase as much or more than you do… If it was stupid thirty years ago to avoid reference librarians, it is downright suicidal now. Information has become a commodity – it is being bartered, sold, and arranged in more ways than anyone except a professional librarian can keep up with. Your job is to analyze information; a librarian’s job is to help you find it in the first place.

Information these days is like Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s entirely in disarray: every little principality mints its own money, passes its own laws, speaks its own language, and has its own rituals. Imagine trying to be a trader selling your wares as you go from town to town, each one under the sway of another prince (or princess) and his/her personally tailored ways of doing business… Only a reference librarian can teach you the tricks of the various systems and direct you to the ones you most need.

I often say, and I am not entirely joking, that you should court your reference librarian as you would court your future (or present) spouse. They are as overloaded as anyone else these days, all the more so being the pitbulls of democracy. So say “thank you” often. Write thank-you notes. Bring them coffee and cookies and chocolates. When they help you a lot, write a letter to the head of the library about how inventive, creative and helpful this person was. Always thank them in the “acknowledgements” section of your book or articles. Behind every good research project written by a salsa-dancing social scientist stands a great librarian, and maybe even a phalanx of them.

Kristin Luker (2008), Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: research in an age of info-glut, Harvard University Press, pp.85-6

Our very own pitbulls of democracy have just been awarded a customer service award as ‘a beacon of innovation and best practice, and an exemplar of excellent customer service.’ While we should perhaps gloss over the notion that library users are customers, and the guff about ‘the wider corporate University ethos’ this is nevertheless testament to a hard working and innovative library. I am constantly impressed by the extent to which the University library seeks to meet student needs with things like 24 hour opening, workshops and 1 to 1 training, the excellent (and oh so necessary) Harvard referencing guide and app, and the More Books scheme, which allows students at all levels to request new additions to stock. When students contact their Academic Subject Librarian, as they most certainly should, remember to thank them, but perhaps don’t refer to them as a pitbull, or indeed court them like a future spouse. That would be weird.

One problem students often encounter when embarking on their own research project is identifying the literature on their chosen topic. For many undergraduate students this is a new skill because for most courses they are provided with often quite lengthy prescriptive reading lists. Doing a piece of independent research involves writing your own reading list. The question is, when faced with a library full of books and journals, how does one know what to read?

When carrying out a piece of research often one is working on a fairly narrow topic and the literature on that topic may be very small. This is what prompts students to turn up for supervision sessions claiming there is no literature on the subject. Leaving aside the cynical thought that this is merely a means of avoiding having to read a large amount of possibly dull books and journal articles, the problem is that whilst there may not be a large literature on your particular topic (indeed that might be a good thing in terms of justifying your work), that does not mean that your topic is not part of a wider literature in a number of different fields. One way of identifying the relevant literature is to draw a simple diagram showing the literature which might help with your research. Your topic is located at the point where the shapes intersect. The point is not to read and master all of the literature in each of the related fields but to look for those parts of them which inform or intersect with your study.

A number of years ago one of our undergraduate students, let’s call him Tom, wanted to examine the impact of the parliamentary expenses scandal on the 2010 general election. It was a very good study which I would strongly recommend you read. The literature on this precise topic is still rather limited, and was even smaller back then, just after the election, but that does not mean that there was not a significant body of literature out there to inform Tom’s study. A simple approach to identifying the literature might involve drawing on two broader bodies of work, literature on parliamentary expenses and on the 2010 general election. As can be seen in the diagram below the study takes place where the two literatures overlap:

In reality any topic, no matter how narrow, is likely to overlap with a much wider body of literature on a range of different topics. In Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences, Kristin Luker, suggests drawing a daisy with a number of overlapping petals. This enables you to identify a diverse range of literatures which may relate to your study. It is of course daunting to identify such a wide and diverse range of relevant literature, but once again, you are really only interested in those points in which the petals overlap with your study, and also perhaps where petals overlap with each other. Using this approach the diagram for Tom’s study might look something like this: