Tuna Breath

Undergraduates & Monographs

I've been listening to the recordings of usability interviews as i drive to work. From the series of usability tests last December and this last series from a few weeks ago, i have been struck by the preference for journals expressed by some of the students.

My postgraduate work was in physics, so i recognize that there's a spectrum in the form of "publish or perish." Still, i recognized the value of a good monograph on a topic. Generally, physicists don't seem to write books until there's a solid understanding of a principle, at which point the book often trumps papers. (I pause to remember my advisors theory that in counting papers for tenure decision that someone should go through and see how many later papers retract or substantially amend previously published work, giving those a "count" of -2. As a student, i was annoyed by one particular experimentalist's repeated introduction sections --i had to dig through repetitive text to see if anything substantial was added to the record.)

This morning i listened to a very savvy student talk about his research for a literature review in psychology. He completely dismissed books as "secondary" sources. For a topic such as his -- an open research question -- he's probably right, yet the first result on a search links to an online text from Wiley. The publisher of this book describes it as:

This book series aims to provide a critical overview of the research evidence concerning the diagnosis and management of the most prevalent mental disorders and a survey of the relevant clinical experience in the various regions of the world.
The first five volumes of this series - dealing respectively with Depressive Disorders, Schizophrenia, Dementia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Bipolar Disorder - have sold out (the last one after only four months). A second edition of the first four volumes (completely updated, with several chapters totally re-written) has just been published in paperback. The volume on Bipolar Disorder has been reprinted and is now again on the market.

It seems to me that a review of the literature might well start with such a book published in 2002 and then fill in the following several years with journal articles. While this is, by definition, a secondary source -- it's not completely worthless.

Instead, books are dismissed by many of our survey students. I suppose i should reflect on this as just a swing in the pendulum. These novice academics are just learning about the value of primary research/sources. As they progress, they may learn that the books published by the researchers in their field, the first often derived from a dissertation, hold the value of original and "primary" thought that has a depth and full understanding that can't be absorbed from a dozen journal articles.

Posted by judielaine at February 10, 2004 11:42 AM | TrackBack