Pre-publication versions of articles

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The alternative to paying the publisher to make an article open access is for authors to do so themselves. Since the publisher owns the copyright to the material, once published, this can only be done legally in certain ways. Authors are allowed to freely disseminate the ‘pre-publication’ version of the article – i.e. a text of the article before it is fully edited for publication. Many universities – including Leicester – have an on-line repository where academics lodge these versions of articles as open access. If you know the author of the material you wish to find, try to track down the institution where they currently work and search their website to see if they have an open access repository. The Leicester Research Archive is a good place to start for any material written by current staff.

Researchers may make the pre-publication versions (and in some cases, controversially, the published versions) freely available via their staff pages on their institution’s website. Again, search for the author via their institution, and look at their ‘Research’ or ‘Publications’ pages. Some researchers will also run blogs, twitter accounts or Facebook pages, usually linked to their staff page, where they may make material available. Valuably, there are also external sites for academics that operate along social media lines, where researchers have individual pages where they upload articles. Two of the best known are:

• www.academia.edu
• www.researchgate.net

You can find a huge amount of material on sites like this. For instance, they have the advantage of using ‘tags’ for articles, making it easier to search for particular topics or approaches. However, you do need to be aware that contributions to these sites are entirely voluntary. It may be difficult to establish which work is peer-reviewed. ‘Peer-reviewed’ means that the relevant article (or book) has passed through the now standard process of being reviewed by other academics, who will require corrections and revisions, and may in some cases decide that the work is not of publishable quality. In general, you should only consult work that has been peer-reviewed. The voluntary basis also means that only a limited (but growing) number of the researchers whose work is important to a particular field will choose to upload material to the site. In particular, you may well find that very senior researchers only may make limited use of these sites. However, in some cases they have the resources to make their own experiments with open access.

A good example of this is the internationally known French Social Theorist, Bruno Latour, who has made his latest book the basis of a crowdsourcing project, where anyone can sign up, read the main text, and post comments/additions/further material alongside. He also has an excellent site featuring a great deal of material:

• An Inquiry into Modes of Existence
• Bruno Latour’s website

Individual researchers may even supply, if requested via email, a copy of an individual article. But please be careful in how you contact researchers. In particular, do bear in mind that most academics have problems dealing with enormous numbers of emails from students and colleagues, and are under no obligation to reply. A little flattery and praise is probably the most effective way of getting a positive response…! Certainly if you do aim to contact a researcher, spell out clearly who you are, why you are interested in the material, what it might be for, etc. Do not ask for too much – don’t ask multiple questions and so demand much time form them. And do address them correctly (e.g. ‘Dear Dr Michael Walker…’ not ‘Hi, Mick…’!)

Open access journals

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There have also been collective efforts to break away from the commercial grip of academic publishers. In particular, there is now a range of ‘open-access’ journals published by scholarly societies and groups of researchers. Some of these journals maintain the high standards found across the sector by using a peer-review process. They pay for publishing costs by charging authors to pay for publication. Other journals attempt to democraticise the publishing process further by absorbing all of the production costs, whilst still maintaining a peer-review and editing process. This means that the journal is typically only available in an on-line format. For instance, in the Management and Organization Studies area, an excellent example of this is the journal Ephemera.

 

A small number of open-access journals have dispensed with peer review. This is very risky, because ensuring that members of the academic community formally judge the quality of each other’s work is the cornerstone of research. You can usually spot that a journal is not peer-reviewed if it appears to be run on an occasional basis with little institutional affiliation or a small or ad hoc editorial board.

 

A directory of a large number of open access journals (most peer-reviewed) is available here: Directory of Open Access Journals

 

Academic publishers appear to be slowly recognizing that the business model of publishing research needs to change. Interestingly, many of them are beginning to publish open-access journals of their own and supporting other open-access initiatives. For example, please take a look at the websites for some of the major Social Science and Arts & Humanities publishers, such as Elsevier, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis (part of Informa and Routledge), Pearson, etc. They will list which open-access journals and projects they currently support. For example:

 

Elsevier open access journals

SAGE Publishing open access

© University of Leicester

 

3.7.

How can you access academic literature?

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Think about any other ways that you could get access to academic literature, and any difficulties that you think you might find. Discuss this with your fellow learners. Also share your views on ‘open-access’ and ‘peer-review’. Have you, for example, previously come across ‘peer-review’?

 

Reflective journal

Remember to also record this aspect of hunting out relevant research and sources in your reflective journal.

 

Finding the right literature when you have access to a university

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Perhaps you have already have access to a University library because you are currently studying for a Masters degree, or may be working in some capacity in a university, or perhaps have access as an alumnus (a former graduate). The process that you need to follow is broadly as described earlier: begin snowballing for material based on the most recent materials you have to hand.

 

But being part of a university gives you access to commercially-published journals (although the specific journals you can access will of course depend upon what your current university library subscribes to) and, just as importantly, dedicated databases.

 

Thus, many universities provide access to databases that index the titles, abstracts and keywords of journal articles and other scholarly forms of publication, making them searchable. Scopus, for example, contains information drawn from over 16,000 journals and other sources, going back to the mid-1960s. Your University librarians or the library webpages will also be able to help you find discipline-specific databases. All of these facilities work in roughly the same way: you enter search terms and set parameters for what publications you wish to search (e.g. social science vs medical science; request particular years; or call for certain kinds of publication formats). The database then generates results that are displayed as titles of individual articles. You can immediately access abstracts to see if you wish to download the full article. If the university library has access to the article then there will usually be a link to it. However, even if your university does not have access, you may still be able to find the article using some of the routes described in the last section or via inter-library loans.

 

Do note that it will usually take a number of different searches to get some of the information you need. Try to refine your search terms each time, narrowing down the topic or the area. If you have limited access to the database, download what you need during each session, read the materials later, and then come back for another session when you have a better sense of the relevant search terms.

 

Importantly, whilst conducting the searches, you may notice that particular journals keep re-appearing. This will be because this journal/s might well be the major forum for debate amongst the academic community who work in this area. Depending on your particular field, it is a good idea to use your library access to look at the most recent issues of that journal – say, the last 5-10 years. Download any articles that look interesting. Also, it will be worthwhile looking out for ‘Special Issues’ of the journal that focus on a particular theme or debate. This will give you a sense of what the recent ‘hot topics’ have been in that area. Being familiar with these will give you a definite advantage in developing your proposal, showing currency and possible gaps.

 

You may also look out for particular authors whose names crop up regularly during your searches. Track them down via their institutional affiliation and look at their staff profiles to see what they are currently working on (note that scholars’ interests do move on, and so some authors may no longer be active in a field that they engaged in 15 years ago).

 

There may also be subject specific institutions that have access to information and articles on their webpages. A good example is the Institute of Historical Research.

 

3.9

YOU’RE HALFWAY THROUGH

Use Google Scholar to search for your idea

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We would now like you to use Google Scholar to try to find literature specific to your research theme or idea.

 

First, try to write the idea that you have for your doctoral proposal as a single sentence. For example:

 

‘Motivation in mining engineers’,

‘Return on investments for social enterprise’,

‘The problem of hospitality in deconstruction’.

‘Prisons and punishment in Victorian literature’

‘The technology of medieval quarrying’.

Place a sentence such as the above into Google Scholar and look over the results that are generated (hopefully a good number!). Review the first ten pages of results and consult the abstracts of any articles that look interesting. Based on these results, try to modify the sentence so that it includes ideas or technical terms derived from your initial search.

 

Now place the revised sentence back into Google Scholar and look at the new results pages. Try to revise the sentence again and repeat the process. Experiment in this way with different initial search terms (this is itself research!). Keep a record of how the sentence becomes modified as a result of each experiment. The purpose of this exercise is to see how quickly it is possible to move from very general to very specific ideas once you locate relevant literature.

 

Reflective journal

It might be helpful to record your searches and results in your reflective diary. Ask yourself how quickly you were able to narrow or tighten the scope of your questioning. Did this help you already in recognising if your theme is current in research terms?

What is critical reading

Study guide

For a printer-friendly PDF version of this guide, click here

Critical reading is an important precursor to critical writing. This Study Guide explains why critical reading is important, and gives some ideas about how you might become a more critical reader. Other Study Guides you may find useful are What is critical writing? Using paragraphs and The art of editing.

What is critical reading?

The most characteristic features of critical reading are that you will:

· examine the evidence or arguments presented;

· check out any influences on the evidence or arguments;

· check out the limitations of study design or focus;

· examine the interpretations made; and

· decide to what extent you are prepared to accept the authors’ arguments, opinions, or conclusions.