Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Reviewing is a central part of the scientific process. Criticism and analysis of
papers written by other scientists is themainmechanism for identifying good research
and eliminating bad, and is arguably as important an activity as research itself. Many
people are intimidated by the task of reviewing, perhaps because it is a kind of
intellectual test: you have been asked to demonstrate a thorough understanding of
someone else's work. It is also intimidating because it brings responsibility; you
want to neither wrongly criticize solid work nor recommend that flawed research be
published. Unhelpfully, the quality of reviewing is highly variable—most researchers
have stories to tell of good work rejected with only a few hasty words of explanation,
or of referees who haven't read the work at all.
Reviewing can be a chore, but deserves the same effort, care, and ethical standards
as any other research activity. And it has rewards, beyond the gratitude of editors
and authors. It can lead you to look at your own work from a fresh perspective, and
exposes you to different kinds of error or failure in research—the average standard of
work submitted for publication is well below that of work that gets published. And,
while you may not be asked to referee a paper as part of your research, your own
work will be reviewed or examined, and thus this chapter provides a perspective on
the standards expected of a submitted paper.
Research Literature
By the time your research is complete, you need to be confident that you have
read and understood all of the scientific literature that has a significant connection
to your work. Your reading achieves several aims. It establishes that your work is
indeed novel or innovative; it helps you to understand current theory, discoveries, and
debates; it can identify new lines of questioning or investigation; and it should provide
alternative perspectives on your work. This reading will ultimately be summarized
in the background sections and the discussions of related work in your write-ups.
The literature on which your work will rely is usually expected to be papers that
have been refereed and published in a reputable venue, theses that have been under-
taken and examined at a reputable institution, and topics that are based on the informa-
tion presented in refereed theses and topics. These are the documents that are accepted
by the research community as a source of knowledge; indeed, they can be regarded as
being the entirety of our scientific knowledge. The literature does not include primary
sources such as lab notebooks, responses to a survey, or outputs from an experiment.
What these lack is interpretation of the contents in light of a specific hypothesis. Other
literature—news articles, sciencemagazines,Wikipedia pages, or documentation, for
example—may alert you to the existence of reputable work, but is rarely worth citing.
That is, your learning may be built on a wider literature, but the arguments in your
write-up should be based on knowledge that is from a refereed source.
A thorough search of the literature can easily lead to discovery of hundreds of
potentially relevant papers. However, papers are not textbooks, and should not be
treated as textbooks. A researcher reading a paper is not studying for an exam; there
