Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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In interdisciplinary studies, on the other hand, the whole point is to draw on
different perspectives and integrate their insights, so an early order of business in
evaluating a book is to identify its perspective. You need to determine where the author is
coming from— what perspective the book represents.
To find out, you need to hunt around. If you are lucky, the authors or editors may
set out in the introduction their perspective on the topic—e.g., my work comes out of the
study of American politics, I’m a professor of political science at Harvard University, and
I teach courses in American politics. More often, though, they introduce only the topic
itself and you are left to try to infer their perspective from what they say about the topic.
With experience, once in a while you can tell something about the perspective from the
publisher—Monthly Review Press publishes Marxists, Transactions Books publishes left
wing sociology, etc.—though more often the publisher is a clue instead to the quality of
the book, with university presses at the top. A foreword (typically written by someone
other than the author) might discuss the author’s perspective, but even that may focus less
on the perspective and more on the significance of the book. Overall, these strategies are
not promising. So where do you go to find the perspective from which the book was
written?
If the book provides it, the quickest and easiest source of information on
perspective is the author’s bio—a biographical sketch that includes institutional
affiliation and position, and selected publications by the author. Look on the back of the
dust jacket (normally removed by libraries) or the back cover of a paperback book or a
glossy hardcover book. You may also find it near the beginning or end of the book.
While it’s worth a quick look to find it, too often it’s simply not provided. The preface is
another reasonable place to look, since it typically explains how the author came to write
the book, but you can’t count on finding it there either. When all else fails, go to Google
and type in the author’s name (in quotation marks), scan down for something that’s likely
to give at least the person’s institutional affiliation and job title. If you assess books with
the computer sitting next to you, it doesn’t take long to find this much information (and
you can enter the full bibliographical information on the book for your annotated
bibliography).
One might naively think that since academic scholars enjoy academic freedom,
they are not fettered by their job title, location within the institution, or the institution
with which they are affiliated. But one’s department makes decisions about one’s
promotion, tenure, and annual salary adjustment; one’s institution pays that salary and
makes decisions about sabbaticals; and one’s discipline determines whether one gets to
present papers at which conferences, whether one gets those papers published in journals,
whether one is invited to contribute to edited volumes or to give talks at departmentallysponsored
lecture series, and whether one is awarded research grants. Control of the
perquisites does not determine what conclusions one must arrive at in one’s publications,
but they do constrain one’s approach—in short, they enforce one’s adherence to the
perspective of the discipline.
The bibliography (a.k.a. references or works cited) is the most consistent source
of information on the author’s perspective. Scan down the list, ask yourself what
disciplines (art history), schools of thought (Marxist), or interdisciplines (women’s
studies) are represented by these titles, and mentally tote up how many are showing up in
each category. Let’s say you find something like 40 books from American politics, 25