Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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• Similar or overlapping phenomena can have different labels because they are studied by
different disciplines (e.g., social movements from sociology and interest groups from
political science; ads from marketing, illustrations from graphic design, and persuasive
visual communications from communications). If you can identify the factors or variables
that produce the major distinctions between them, you can construct a model that sets out
the network of interrelations between those disciplines.
• The separate topics such as economic development, environmental impacts, and disease
prevention may all relate back to a single theme, such as sustainability; if that theme is at
the heart of your project, what you’ve done is validate your choice of books and give a
label to your criterion for selecting them.
• Discourse communities go through cycles of intense debate which culminates in one
group winning out, stalemate, or perhaps (as in the nature-nurture debate) the recognition
that both sides were partly right, followed by a period of “normal science” (a la Thomas
Kuhn) in which all the implications of that paradigm are worked out. During the early
period, you tend to find hot argument, lots of sides, and little evidence to back up any
position—debates generate more heat than light because they’re based more on
presupposition than on fact. As time goes by, the field develops clearer definitions and an
evidentiary base that can be used to settle disputes, so positions start to coalesce; and by
the later period, “debate” becomes mostly a matter of emphasis—it’s over differences in
degree not type. But at some point, perhaps as much as a generation later, another major
issue will flair up, and the cycle will resume. Part of what you’re doing when you come
on a literature for the first time is finding out where it is in this cycle. After all, it’s the
luck of the draw where in that cycle you happen to first encounter a literature, where the
field is in its evolution. It’s quite possible to find that a discourse community is in a
mixed part of the cycle, with a couple issues hotly debated and several others engaged in
normal science. But it’s also possible that you’ve failed to identify the issues for any of
the reasons discussed in this manual.
• Whenever you encounter a topic or issue across an ideological divide, with deeply
embedded beliefs or powerful emotions on both sides, there will be a lot of distortion of
the opposing side. People talk past each other rather than engage each other’s ideas. At
least you have a topic or issue that is obviously important. Other projects will find
themselves trying to convince readers their topic or issue is worthy of attention, worth
taking seriously.
• An issue you thought was contemporary may have been going on for a long time,
perhaps under a different label, especially if it is a really basic or fundamental issue.
• If the same terms keep popping up in different books, you can go on line to Sherlock
and do key word searches for those terms to see what else has been written on them.
• Even though you’re trying not to look for connections, organizing the literature review
by topic and then issue helps you see where the connections need to be made.
Literature Review Presentations
Literature review presentations focus primarily on problems you encountered in
completing your first lit review. Like earlier presentations, they are not graded, and the
point is not to show off what you know, but to get help with what you don’t understand.
In your lit review presentation, you should tell people what approach you took to that lit
review, what problems you ran into implementing that strategy, and where you need help.