Dan Siebert recently published a book chapter titled “Conducting a Timely Literature Search”. The title of the book where Dan’s chapter appeared is Designing, Conducting, and Publishing Quality Research in Mathematics Education and was edited by Keith Leatham. Dan has answered a few questions about this chapter below:
Who would you say is the target audience for this chapter?
Graduate students and new faculty in mathematics education.
What is the big problem you hoped to address with this chapter?
Literature searches can often be overwhelming and take an inordinate amount of time. This chapter offers practical advice for saving time and effort in completing a literature search.
What are come of the key ideas in the chapter?
Key ideas include creating and maintaining a reading list of relevant sources, reading sources for different purposes, and coordinating the literature search with the writing process.
What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from the chapter?
I hope that readers will identify and prioritize sources before they begin reading them, identify purposes for reading each source so as to determine what parts should be read and how carefully, and use the challenges they encounter during writing to direct the focus of their reading and source selection.
Abstract:
Literature searches play an essential role in designing, conducting, and publishing high-quality mathematics education research. In this chapter, I suggest three stages for completing an efficient and thorough literature search, including specific strategies and tools for each stage. In Stage 1, researchers identify promising sources and compile a prioritized reading list before engaging in extensive reading. In Stage 2, researchers use and regularly update their prioritized reading list so they can read and extract important information from the most pertinent sources. In Stage 3, researchers identify specific needs in their writing and update and use their prioritized reading list to read and extract the information necessary to address these specific needs. By following these stages and using the recommended strategies, researchers can efficiently conduct the literature searches they need to support their research work.