At this stage, your knowledge of the topic may vary between sketchy and familiar. Whatever stage you are in, it is important to begin with a bird’s eye view of the topic.
The main problems students have is they tend to select a few articles on the topic that grab their interest. What you have to remember is that academic articles are mainly written for the cognescenti, those who have been working on the topic for most of their careers.
1) Step 1 therefore should be to start with the most basic information available on the topic. In academics, this would be a textbook, designed to simplify and synthesize the main ideas on a topic. Once you have examined these resources, a good second step is to look at single-authored books on the topic. If you are studying Chile, a book on the history and one on the political economy of Chile could together give you a good idea of the main periods and themes of the country. If you are writing on corporate social responsibility, someone who has written a book on the topic will likely cover the main literature in the opening chapter. Look for titles like, “An Intro. to” or “Leading issues in.” In general, it is better to start with more recent books, examining all adjacent possibilities by call # on the shelf, as they should represent and summarize what has been done before. Of course, the quality of writing and analysis varies greatly, and all authors have some bias, so you really want to look at several books, make notes, and compare how they look at the key issues differently.
2) Step 2 would be to look at review articles. In journals such as Latin American Research Review, at the end of each issue, are reviews of multiple books on the same topic. Used alone, these will not really give you enough information to understand the author’s points. But after step 1, they can give you valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of competing approaches to a topic.
3) Step 3 would be to look at multiple author edited volumes. Skimming the table of contents of these and reading carefully the intro chapters will again help you to make sure you are not missing any key aspects or themes.
4) Step 4 is to make a catalogue of what data are available and to prepare some basic excel charts on the overall trajectory. For a country, the main exports and imports over time. For an issue such as education, what data are available and what do they say, eg how has overall literacy changed over time; how has female participation, etc. Here your previous steps will help you to hone in on what are the foundational and contentious variables in the discussion.
At first glance, this could be a monumental task. However, if you approach this task with purposefulness and with the idea of developing new habits, it is quite feasible to finish within a week. You want to make sure that you do not read word for word. What you are doing is scanning information, reading particular areas carefully, in order to answer the question at hand. You are then in steps 2-4 scanning new information to make sure you have not missed anything.
The key question for starting research is:
What are the key paradigms used to explain the trajectory of the country/issue? What helps to explain the differences in those paradigms? What kind of variables, methods, and data help to explain these differences?
If you analyze the trees without this forest level view, you have a high chance of (re) producing bias and missing key aspects of the debate. If you look carefully for the right kind of material (syntheses and reflections), such as the chapter we read in class for the first week, you will not get buried. You will instead be able to say confidently, it is clear that there are 3 main approaches to LA devt. historically, dependency, structuralism, and neoliberalism. Every subsequent step will then be informed by this and help you to begin to categorize authors and begin to develop your own perspective and potential contribution, which is our end goal.
I am available for discussion as you progress.
