Welcome to Librarians Spill the Tea, where we explore the context around scholarly drama. For each episode, you’ll find an Episode Description, Timestamps, full Transcript, followed by our Show Notes, which contain any works and other links mentioned. Thanks for listening to Librarians Spill the Tea! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, episodes, and updates. Description In our first “Brewing Tea” episode, we focus less on the drama, and more on the nuts and bolts of the research process. We cover what a literature review is, what a literature review is not, how to write one, how to use one, and why we should even care about literature reviews. Timestamps 00:00 - Intro 00:39 - Pin Check! 2:51 - What is a lit review? 3:24 - Lit review vs. Annotated Bibliography 4:19 - Are lit reviews different across disciplines? 8:01 - Defining related terms 8:34 - What is synthesis? 9:49 - Synthesis vs. description vs. interpretation 11:09 - Lit vs. scoping vs. systematic reviews 13:21 - Why care about a lit review? 23:29 - Making a lit review/where to start 31:57 - Organizing a lit review 32:07 - LibGuides 40:39 - Lit reviews are narrative 43:02 - How do you use a lit review? 48:21 - Library Favs segment Transcript Mary (with music) Ready for some scholarly drama? Join your librarians as we spill the tea. (music) Welcome to Librarians Spill the Tea. I'm Mary. Tristan I'm Tristan. Mary We're going to be doing a Brewing Tea episode, which is where we talk about some of the nuts and bolts of research, and maybe what different terms mean things you should be thinking about, all that good stuff. So today we are going to be talking about literature reviews. OK, Tristan, what pins are you wearing today? Tristan I am wearing an enamel pin that looks like an award ribbon, but it's made out of books and it says “library enthusiast.” Mary Mhmm. Tristan And then I'm also wearing a pin that Mary made. That has a turtle? Tortoise? Turtle on it? Mary I searched turtle to get that picture, so we're gonna go with turtle. Tristan OK saying “I read banned books.” It's very cute. Mary We have a lot of pins related to banned books. Mostly because I was really into making buttons at that point in my career, when it was banned books week. Tristan Amazing. Good work. Mary Thank you so much. Tristan What about you, Mary? What are you wearing? Mary OK, so I am wearing also a button that I made, and this one says, “tomorrow needs you” and it's a yellow background with blue text. It has like a little sun on there and then “call/text 988,” and that's one I made for Suicide Prevention Month, but it's like always on my backpack, and I'm just wearing it today. Tristan Yeah, that's a good one. Mary Also, I feel like for folks that are at Beloit, if you ever want one of the buttons we've made-- I'll link like at least the images for these maybe. Just DM us on Instagram and I will do my best to get you one. ‘cause we can always make a couple more. Tristan Yes, should we also highlight that celeb has button making materials and devices? Mary Oh, we should. Mm-hmm. So where we record our podcast, aside from when I hide in my little tiny walk in closet to fill in gaps, is the awesome CELEB podcasting studio, which has a great setup. So Beloiters, if you're listening to this, definitely come check it out if you want to start your own recordings, and come use the button makers, they have multiple. Tristan Multiple button makers, multiple sizes. They have sewing machines, 3D printers. I think they make stickers and do printing. Mary Mm-hmm. They have the T-shirt maker thing. Yeah. Definitely reach out to celeb if you're interested in trying out some making stuff. So we're going to start today by--Tristan, could you please explain, what is a lit review? Tristan Alright, so a lit review is generally an overview of published literature on a specific topic or theme or idea question that analyzes and might summarize different writings, different works that are related to your research or whatever you're interested in. How was that? Mary OK, that was great. That was really good. What is then the difference between a literature review and an annotated bibliography? Tristan Oh, great question. So an annotated bibliography generally does not have as much synthesis or evaluation. It's more on the summary side of things, so it'll typically be a list of citations and then, depending maybe on your faculty or your instructor, you might be asked to also summarize the source. You might be asked to say a sentence or two on how you would use it, but typically it will be formatted very differently than a literature review. So typically a literature review is formatted more as a paper with kind of an introduction, a middle and end. Mary Mhmm. Tristan Whereas an annotated bibliography typically is a list. Mary OK. Yeah. I like that. Are there differences in literature reviews across different fields and which ones do you know about being a little different? Tristan Yes, there are definitely differences between disciplines and how we approach light reviews, how how we do them, maybe even when and why we do them. So I think, for the humanities, I'll speak mostly to the humanities. That's what my background is in. That's where most of my liaison departments are. For the humanities, for lit reviews, we tend to focus more on theory, I would say, and I'm going to actually borrow something from one of our faculty here, Dr. Johnson, who teaches in the Critical Identity Studies department and the religious studies department. So one time I visited one of her classes to talk about citations, and as part of that conversation, she brought up the idea of “research genealogy,” which I just love as a concept. I've been obsessed with it ever, ever since she brought it up. But it's basically the idea that, in the humanities especially, when you are doing your research, although I think this definitely applies to other fields as well, you are building an understanding and a discussion between the sources that have come before you. So you're building a genealogy by looking back and putting different sources together in context. Mary I like that way of explaining it. Tristan Right. And so I think that's what a lot of humanities literature reviews aim to do. You're putting together resources, you are talking about how they relate, how they are conversing with each other, but then also how they are related to the work that you yourself are doing. But what about in STEM, Mary? Mary Ohh my goodness, I'm so glad you asked. No. So I did talk to one of our chemistry professors and then I also talked to my sister, who is a physics professor at another small school. Just because I had some thoughts, right? But really the most of the questions we get literature reviews are tied to students that would be categorized at least somewhere between humanities and STEM, kind of like in the poli-sci, history, literature, other fields. Tristan Right. So and we are a liberal arts school, so it makes sense that there's a lot of crossover. Mary Yes, yes, but in a lot of sciences, lit reviews are less often assigned in classes for especially undergraduate level students, and they might make more of an appearance in, if you're looking for a full lit review, professionals would publish that in an academic journal to kind of provide almost like a snapshot of the state of the field at the time of writing. Now, just because a full lit review is not generally assigned in a class doesn't mean that they're not using some of those tenants. So that might appear instead, in part of an introduction to a paper, it might appear just in a little bit of a different format than we're used to seeing in a full review like us as humanities kids would envision. Another kind of explanation for how these lit review things happen--What a weird way to say that it's okay--Or why maybe you would look at a lit review in these fields. Someone's making a claim that I either want to make or refute, and so I'm looking into if the way that they're saying it is how I wanna say it, and if it makes sense in the context of the rest of the field, we're gonna kind of come back to how you would interact with a lit review a little bit later on. So I'll put a pin in that for now. I did also think it would be important to talk about some other key terms because we kind of throw around the term lit review a lot. So it can stand for literature review. That's probably the most common. I've also seen literacy review, which was a new one for me. In searching online, it it just means the same thing. So I couldn't tell you, but yeah, it seems to be kind of used interchangeably. There are a few other terms that I wanted to talk about. First, do you have a good explanation of what synthesis means? Tristan I’ll give you one and then you can you can add one or add it as you see fit. Mary OK, perfect. Tristan I would describe synthesis, especially in the context of a literature review or academic research, as taking a look at a source, thinking about what that source is saying. What argument it's making and then it taking that idea, that knowledge you have of that source and thinking about how it relates to or contextualizes your research. Mary Sure. No, I think that's a good one. I honestly struggle with defining this term. So that's part of the reason why I asked you. Tristan Oh, thanks, Mary. Mary You're welcome, but I did kind of come up with a very mini definition of my own, so I like to think of synthesis as more reorganization. So you're taking these topics that you're learning from a specific source, and then you're fitting them together with others. Or another way I’ve seen it explained is you're bringing it all together. So you're explaining what was happening in each of these sources, and then you're kind of sticking them together and explaining how they all fit. You're kind of becoming the glue that holds us all together. Tristan
