52 4 Making a Strong Start
What constitutes ‘relevant’ varies between disciplines, but in general the bulk of
the citations will be to academic literature, that is, to documents that are accepted
by the community as a reliable source of knowledge. These are typically refer-
eed, widely accessible, identifiable, and durable. A PowerPoint slide found on the
web fails most of these criteria, as does an email, even if from an eminent author-
ity. Slightly more tricky are primary sources. In the sciences, these might include
lab notebooks, say; these are the evidence underpinning your conclusions, but the
citable form of these is the discussion of them in your thesis, not the notebooks
themselves. In the humanities, primary sources might include, say, anything from
wartime diaries to logs of web page accesses; whether they would be cited is disci-
pline-dependent, but most often they would be listed as sources rather than included
in the thesis’s bibliography.
There are many ways in which we learn beyond the academic literature, includ-
ing newspaper articles, corridor conversations, resources such as Wikipedia, and
the web in general. In most cases it is appropriate to confirm such knowledge in
an academic source, and it is the academic source that should be cited. To take a
wider perspective, we read for many reasons: to establish that our work is novel and
to identify new lines of questioning, for example, as well as to set our work in an
academic context. Such reading informs us, but is not necessarily a part of the final
thesis. Reading can sometimes be footnoted rather than listed as a formal reference.
To explore the literature, I recommend the strategy of finding the gateways then
following the paths. A gateway is a paper or book or other source you discover
through actively exploring, say by using a search facility to try and find new mate-
rial on a given topic; or you may be introduced to a gateway in a seminar, or by a
colleague. In such discovery, don’t expect to find what you need by simply issuing
a quick query at a search interface. As you search, you will learn new terminology
and use it to help discover more references. Also, be broad in your use of tools.
General web resources, university portals, and publisher portals all tend to index
different materials and may provide very different results.
Gateways lead to paths. Each paper has a list of citations; each paper may also be
cited by others, and online resources can help you find these works too. Following
these trails, or pathways, is a certain way to discover new literature. Use the web to
chase down other work by the same authors and same research groups. Once you’ve
identified other people working the same area, regularly check to see if they have
published something new. I also recommend that you plan your search. Identify
fields and subfields that you need to explore, and focus on one at a time. And be
inclusive in your definition of ‘relevance’; for example, a paper can be useful, not
just because it is on the right topic, but because it embodies an approach to a similar
kind of problem in an interesting way, and it is this approach that you wish to cite.
Don’t neglect the traditional source of academic literature: namely, libraries. Stu-
dents in some disciplines now have little immediate reason to go to the library, since
so much of the literature is online, but even in these cases I advise the occasional
library visit—and I am often rewarded by students telling me how much unexpected
work the visit turned up. Simply browsing the shelves near their usual journals and
texts can turn up a great range of new sources.