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Expanding Your Research

The introductory materials that you located will help provide a basic grounding in your understanding of a key issue or displacement situation.  They will also point to several additional readings on your topic.  While these are useful starting points for your research, they will not represent the sum total of what has been written.  To expand your reading even further, look for literature reviews or bibliographies as these will provide you with a set of ready-made references on your topic.

Bibliographies

See also: Bibliographies (index term)

Bibliographies can be used either to initiate the research process by providing a starter set of literature references on a defined topic, or to expand the research process by providing additional references to previously unknown literature.  Typical features of these resources include a systematic arrangement to promote easy navigation and consultation; a statement of scope and purpose; full bibliographic details to facilitate retrieval; and often, annotations.  Bibliographies are particularly useful when they point researchers to a variety of information types (e.g., journal articles, books, chapters, web sites, etc.) compiled from a wide range of sources. 

While this section predominantly highlights annotated bibliographies, it includes several unannotated compilations which were deemed to provide added value because of their systematic organization, thematic arrangement, or keywords.  In addition, all bibliographies from the Refugee Survey Quarterly (RSQ) are indexed, despite their lack of abstracts, in the interest of promoting greater access to and awareness of this regular feature of the journal.

View the list of bibliographies (click several times on the "Name" column to organize titles alphabetically).

How to find other bibliographies:  While published bibliographies are a mainstay of other academic disciplines, many bibliographies in the forced migration field can be characterized as grey literature; that is, they tend to be distributed informally and often are made available online rather than in libraries.  That said, users can search library catalogues for bibliographies using the LCSH >>[subject]—bibliography<< or the ITRT index term >>bibliographies<<.

Literature Reviews

While not a traditional reference source, literature reviews like bibliographies can point you to relevant studies in your area of interest – and someone has done the legwork for you.  Because literature reviews are surveys of what has already been written on a particular topic, their discussions are usually presented as narrative formats and framed thematically.  While this arrangement may not promote easy browsing, it adds value in the form of (sometimes brief) analysis and synthesis, which is similar to the function of handbooks and encyclopedias.  Other terms used for these resources are “research syntheses” or “state of the art reviews.” 

The literature reviews reflected here were prepared either 1) as surveys of subject areas to track trends, identify gaps, and provide recommendations for future research directions; 2) as reports on what the current state of knowledge or thinking is on a particular subject area or even a field of study; or 3) as the principal research methodology for a study to gather information and data about a subject area in order to answer a specific research question.  Excluded were 1) research reports and theses which undertook literature reviews as part of standard scholarly practice in order to provide a rationale for why a study needed to be conducted; and 2) studies which undertook literature reviews as one of several methodologies for gathering data.

View the list of literature reviews (click several times on the "Name" column to organize titles alphabetically).

How to find other literature reviews:  Neither LCSH nor ITRT offers a specific subject heading or index term for “literature review.”  In library catalogues, then, users should search for occurrences of “literature review,” “review of the literature,” “state of the art review,” “research review,” and other word variations in combination with their subject terms of interest in order to locate this resource type.  Many journal databases offer the option to limit search results to reviews.  For example, PubMed’s search results include a tab labeled “review” that allows users to immediately create a search subset that only displays research review articles.[19]  Users should therefore check for similar “limit” options in other journal databases. 

Endnotes

19. PubMed is available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez. 

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