Tag Archives: literature reviews

Peer review explained by Professor Brian Cox

Peer review is a process designed to ensure the quality, more specifically the reliability and validity of material which is published in academic journals. It is absolutely central to the development of academic knowledge and provides a barrier to unfounded … Continue reading

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Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences

There is a tendency amongst some students looking for an approach for their undergraduate dissertation to claim they want to do “library based research”, by which they mean they are going to look through whatever literature is available to them … Continue reading

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Beware the alibi of photocopies

There are many intellectual aspirins in Oliver Burkeman’s weekly, ‘This column will save your life’, in the Saturday edition of The Guardian. The column ‘What unread books can teach us’ is particularly pertinent to the budding researcher. In it Burkeman, drawing on observations by … Continue reading

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On the importance of literature reviews

In a recent article in The Washington Post, Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, neatly summarised the importance of literature reviews in academic papers: Done well, a literature … Continue reading

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Let’s hear it for librarians, the pitbulls of democracy

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 … Continue reading

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