Wellesley College

1. What’s the Difference?
• What is this “peer-reviewed” business?
• You may need scholarly articles for your assignment.
• Not all journals are scholarly. But how do you tell what’s what?

2. The Literature Review
• You have a topic in mind so you do a search.
• You find some articles and draw on these past articles so you can quote
them in your paper to support your points.
• Classic papers.
• A place to start would be to see who has CITED that work recently and in
what context. You want to trace the evolution of those ideas FORWARD in
time!
• So how can you do this when there is SO MUCH STUFF OUT THERE?

3. Here’s some examples….
As a researcher, you can see who is citing your work and in what context. Also
good if you find yourself in a tenure track position one day.
Address fields: lets you see where an author is from. This is useful if you want to
see what your peers are publishing and where. Also what journals they are
publishing in.
Our first search: hyperconsumption
Author search: Ritzer, G (highest to lowest ranking)
**notice that you do NOT spell out the first name. Use initials.
Cited reference search: George Ritzer’s book, The McDonalization of Society.
**this database is BIG on abbreviations.
***work search

4. Author finder: George Ritzer
Analyze feature: Let’s see what this does!
**This feature is good if you are tracking publication patterns, or doing a general
search of scholarship (who is doing it? Where, that is, what country? Which
organizations? What journals are they publishing in? What subject categories does
this particular department publish in?)
Address search: Know a department? Remember those dreaded abbreviations!
Wellesley Coll, Dept Sociol, Wellesley, MA 02481

5. Some words of advice!
• To do a thorough job on your literature review, you will need to do it several
times throughout the writing/research process.
• This will help you frame and reframe your research question.
• At the end of the research process, take another quick look at Web of
Knowledge just to make sure you did not miss any stragglers. Here is where
the citation alerts can come in handy!!!
• Questions? Now you try!