Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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whole, then on a particular topic. Instead of ignoring a second book with a similar title,
see if it is coming at the same topic from a different perspective; e.g., books on the same
environmental policy may be written by political scientists or by natural scientists, and
both perspectives are important. Remember that the literature review is much harder than
the annotated bibliography, and it becomes easier if you’ve done a good job of
categorizing topics and a thorough job of finding the key books for each topic and for
each perspective on a topic. If you don’t, you’ll discover that you need to stop work on
the lit review to go back and redo that part of your annotated bibliography before you can
continue.
Precision becomes important when you work on your annotated bibliography. The
slightest error in copying down the call number, and you won’t find it when you go to the
shelves. An error in identifying the perspective of an author can really throw you off later
when you write your lit review. Even an error in copying down a quote from the book
that sets out its approach can come back to haunt you because you may well end up using
that quote in your project, and you don’t want to waste time later on rechecking quotes—
get them right the first time.
If you cannot keep yourself from reading the books, then decide how many books
you need to evaluate in a day, follow your system (See end of Evaluating Sources for
how to develop a system) ruthlessly each day to evaluate that many books, and then in
your free time later in the day, you can read to your heart’s content, and long as you’re on
pace to complete your annotated bibliography on time.
The results. Each year, one or two seniors make the scary discovery that
“Someone else has already written my project.” If that happens, don’t let it faze you. You
need to realize that’s not a problem, because research is an on-going process of
exploration. Every time a step is completed in the research process, new opportunities
open up. There’s always a next thing to do, a next step. If someone has written your
project already, that means you will be able to deal with the topic at a more sophisticated
level. Someone else has already done the initial spadework for you, and you can build on
it. So there is no such thing as being “scooped” the way a journalist can be. Your initial
response is probably that someone has beat you to it so now you have to find a new topic,
but that’s simply wrong. Someone beat you to the lower-level stuff so now you can focus
on higher-level stuff that’s more interesting. Be glad someone else wrote your project
already. Whatever you do, don’t panic. Say ‘thank you’ and seize the opportunity to treat
the topic at a more advanced level.
Most seniors, however, decide to modify the topic for their senior project in light
in the topics that other scholars have written on. That may also happen as you write the
literature review, outline your project, or write your first chapter. It is part of the normal
evolution of your topic as you become more knowledgeable about what else has been
written in your field. It reflects your willingness to learn and, as such, it is something to
feel good about, not something to worry about.
Annotated bibliographies are a useful tool. The annotations are there to serve you.
An initial annotated bibliography is assigned to get you started (and show you how to do
it), but every year seniors routinely continue work on their annotated bibliographies well
into second semester, even though they’re not getting a grade on it and no one is telling
them to do it or looking over their shoulder to make sure they do it; indeed, in most cases,
the bibliography in their final project is not even annotated. The reason you need an