Literature Review and Technology

Kern:

Tools	Advantages	Drawbacks
Refworks	This could link with the library	Can’t be used without internet; it doesn’t import meta-data from PDF
End note	It is a desk top app, which ; it identifies mate-data from pdf	Although it could identify meta-data from pdf, however, they don’t have capacity to work with pdf. The price is a bit expensive.
Zotero	Easy to incorporate reference using drag and drop; allows researchers to collaborate; have the ability of recognizing and importing pdf data. It also works with google docs.	Limited spaces for uses. It is not a desktop program.
Mendeley	Easy to cite with drag and drop features; allows dragging and dropping into text editors; recognizes Pdf meta-data;	Some problems with the web version: not reliable of ingesting Pdfs. Attachment space is limited to 1 GB.

Anderson & Kaunkach:

The literature review serves to familiarize other researchers, not only with the results but also the process of conducting the study. Although the Internet changes our approaches to do literature review, the criteria of good literature reviews do not change. The internet also speeds up the process of publishing researchers’ work. It made the publication of preliminary findings much easier. However, making connection with our small group discussion, this also has problems of making researchers’ preliminary results vulnerable. Internet also enhances the relevancy of literatures located from the Internet. Personally, I don’t buy this a lot as I thought relevancy was what researchers should worry about. Although the researcher had found something relevant from the internet, it was his/her job to decide whether it should be added or not in the work. This leads me think of the points we brought up in class that technological tools sets a distance between researchers and the date. In literature review, our data are literatures. In this case, it is technology or the search engine who decides the relevancy of the data—literatures.

With the increasing accessibility from the Internet, people could publish their work online, which made the authenticity become a problem. This might also have a problem related to accuracy. One tip from senior researchers is to look at the references.

One thing that resonates me a lot is their mentioning of that due to “a bewildering and immense sea of information”, researchers feel more challenge to cite properly. I also have hard time to remember where the resources come from when I am writing. References organizing tools would make life easier by having a “my own” database. Technology has the affordance of organizing references better. It also has abilities of detecting plagiarism. Plagiarism was not a new problem that was brought with technology. It has been a problem since quill pens. However, technology could help with detecting it.

Paulus, Lester & Dempster noted the importance of reviewing the literature:1. Validating the research question had not be “researched” before or seldom touched; 2. Situating the work in a larger context and joining the conversation established by prior researchers. I like their points of literature could be one part of the introduction, and even the discussions and findings. As novice research, I had a very hard time to write the introduction part. I struggled with the scale of exhaustiveness . The mistake I usually made is the introduction is too detail-oriented. Thus, it looks like literature review.  

They talked about the relationship between the recency and authority of resources. It sounds like to me that the more authority the source is, the less recent it is. This occurred to me as the affordances and limitations of technology. The affordances of new technology is to have more updated literature at the expense of loosing authority.