Since I am giving a lecture on
using the internet for political research (for POL9RM), it seems appropriate to upload it
to your actual internet. This is, depending on how you view these things,
either an excessively long or good-value blog. We might settle on ‘generous’.
The lecture will be split into
two basic issues:
1. What type of information
should you seek, and from where?
2. What are the best (or, at
least, most used) tools to use to source that information?
Types of Information
Before we examine how best to use
the internet for political research, we should consider why you (as a former first
year student) may have been advised *not* to rely on the internet to produce
essays. Why would there be such an objection to using freely available
information produced by such a wide range of people? Why, perhaps, would people
criticise you for favouring the democratic, as opposed to the elite, production
of knowledge? The answer is not that your older lecturers - who still remember
the days of punch cards, rolodexes, hard copy journals and the need to speak to
someone about borrowing books - resent the fact that you can get information so
quickly without going to a library or even leaving your home. It is also not a
form of group closure, in which we protect and promote our own people, methods
and types of information. It is not that
lecturers associate undergraduate student internet research with a small bunch
of people copy-and-pasting from Wikipedia into their essays (although this does
happen, sometimes).
The more important explanation is
that, in a world where the amount of information seems infinite, it may be
increasingly difficult to identify the information to which we should pay most
or least attention. We need to identify
some sort of hierarchy of important and/ or reliable information. This is a
skill like any other. Your successful development of this skill will be
reflected in your grades, since it will relate to the willingness of your essay
markers to accept the information you present, according to the way in which
you account for your information.
One way to address this issue is to
consider why lecturers tend to treat books and/ or journal articles as the gold
standard of information - at least as secondary sources, before you are
expected to do your own research using primary sources such as government
documents.
Possible answers (though not
always useful answers) include:
1. They are peer reviewed.
Lecturers may recommend journals that only allow publication after a number of
relevant academics have commented on the work, often anonymously. The number of
peer reviewers may vary from 1 to 6; in my experience an article is usually read
by 2 or 3 anonymous reviewers. Their evaluation of journals may be linked
partly to the reputations that some journals have in terms of academic rigour, linked
to the need for scholars to anticipate and address critical reviews before
having their work accepted.
2. They are competitive and much
work is rejected. Some journals have an acceptance rate below 10%, which helps
them develop an image of prestige and cutting edge research. (You can get a
rough idea of acceptance rates in politics and IR here -
http://www.reviewmyreview.eu/ ). Some
people also put some faith in proxy measures of journal reputations, such as
their ‘impact factors’ (although this is a problematic faith). It is also an
increasing trend to evaluate the status of individual scholars according to the
extent to which the publication is cited by other scholars (see below on Google
scholar). Being well cited is a proxy used increasingly to gauge respect for
the information.
3. They may be based on a long
period of scholarly research. This varies from discipline to discipline. Consider,
for example, the historical research produced over years after painstaking
attention to thousands of documents.
4. The research may be
theoretically informed. Being theoretically informed means being aware of the
general implications of individual pieces of information. In part, this focus
on theory is based on one role of scientific research: to draw lessons from
sets of single cases to produce insights that may apply to many or all cases. A
focus on theory is a focus on generalisation – something that is difficult to
do if we rely only on information that is produced in very particular circumstances.
5. The research may be
methodologically sophisticated. Most research is required to reach some sort of
level of sophistication. For example, a quantitative survey requires a certain
(large) number of responses to be considered statistically significant (in
other words, for us to conclude that the results could not have happened by
chance). It is then subject to a series of statistical techniques (which you
may learn, using programmes such as SPSS) to explore the associations between
variables. Qualitative research may be judged on different criteria, but there
is a similar requirement that the conduct of the research meets certain
professional criteria. The data may then be subject to further techniques to
gauge its meaning and significance. It is often a condition of journal article
acceptance that the scholars set out clearly their methods (and often provide a
copy of the data for others to use).
6. The research may be
empirically rich. Much research is based on surveys of thousands of people or
qualitative interviews of dozens or hundreds. The data may be combined with
documentary and historical analysis to produce a wealth of information. That
information may be compared with information from other studies, to help
accumulate knowledge within particular fields.
7. The authors may be meticulous
when they identify the source of their information. One aim of the scholarly
text is to show the reader where they got their information, to allow the
reader to follow up, confirm and/ or read further. Most of you will have
noticed the attention that we pay to your referencing style and bibliographies
(hopefully most of us are looking for a consistent style rather than a
particular style, although be suspicious of people who don’t agree that Harvard
is best). This is because, when people make empirical or theoretical claims,
the understanding is that they show us the information on which they based
their claims (or, at least, they give us the option to follow up their work).
It is according to these kinds of
criteria that we may judge other sources of information. In many cases, the
information may be useful even if it does not live up to many or any of these criteria.
For example, it is legitimate to use newspaper stories and commentary pieces,
particularly if they provide much-needed timely information and the source is
seen as reliable (indeed, although some newspapers now suffer poor reputations,
we can still identify a tradition of fact/ source checking as a routine part of
information gathering – partly, but not exclusively, because journalists are
generally proud of their reputations and newspaper managers do not want to be
sued). However, we would then have to consider the trade off against the academic
‘gold standard’ (is the information likely to be theoretically informed and
based on a sophisticated method?) and consider the extent to which the trade is
appropriate. In many cases, this just comes down to a mix of sources – student
essays could benefit from immediate sources but those sources may not be an
alternative to a more comprehensive review of the relevant literature.
However, this is not to say that
academic information is unproblematic. We may be meticulous when we catalogue
our sources of information, but that information may still be of varying value.
For example, quantitative work may be limited by the availability of
information provided by other actors (such as governments) and qualitative work
may be limited by access to the right sources of information and simple things
like the ability of interviewees to recall or provide an honest recollection of
relevant information. The more difficult task, then, is to consider in more
depth how people access and present information and how we might compare and
critically analyse those sources to produce what we consider to be an accurate
or valuable overall assessment of the available information.
Search Tools
We might divide that search
broadly intro two categories: primary and secondary sources. I will a focus on
Scottish politics to tailor the advice.
Secondary sources
The starting point for most
students is likely to be a secondary source: you look through the existing
academic literature for your information. Those texts analyse things like
government documents, and you get your information about those documents
indirectly, through a secondary source.
For me, the best way to start a
search for secondary sources is to use Google Scholar (
http://scholar.google.co.uk/). You
enter a small number of search terms and it produces a list of materials to
consult. Most Universities also have the ability (particularly if you search on
campus) to link the article access directly to the search. Your results are
likely to reflect your search terms. For example, a search for ‘Scottish
politics’ reveals a list of general texts, while a search for referendums in
Scotland produces more specific texts. They tend to be organised according to
the extent to which they have been cited elsewhere (which often produces a tendency
for older materials to be listed first).
A good rule of thumb is that you
should use Scholar more as you progress in your studies. The ‘further reading’
section of a textbook, or list of readings in a course guide, is essential when
you are an early undergraduate. When you become an advanced undergraduate, and
start to plan to write a relatively independent piece of work, you are expected
to do your own searches for the relevant literature. This will require you to
think carefully about your research question and the keywords you will have to
use to get the most out of the search. You may also need to think about the
sources of offer from Google scholar. There is now a wide availability of
journals and books, but how do you prioritise and/ or determine the quality of
the information?
Primary Sources
An independent project will also
prompt you to seek primary sources of information, including government and
parliamentary sources. This requires a bit more thought, since you are unlikely
to get useful information unless you have first thought about what your
research problem is and how you intend to address it. In other words, you think
about what you want to know, what are the most appropriate methods to get the
right information, and *then* do these sorts of searches.
Government and parliamentary sources
It is quite amusing to look
through the Burnham et al (2008) 2
nd edition of ‘Research Methods in
Politics’ because it still talks about CD ROMS. These were growing in
popularity when I was a student, but you may never have used a physical, round,
disk to secure information (and may never have to). Instead, sources of
government and parliamentary information tend to be available online directly
from them (or, if you are that way inclined, through sites that claim to
provide documents that governments don’t want you to see). For example the
Scottish Government has a fairly extensive site (
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics)
which allows you to search using key terms. This tends to be less
straightforward than a Google Scholar search, forcing you to be much clearer in
your mind about what sort of information you want (since you will have to be
fairly specific in your search unless you want to sift through a tonne of
information). Similarly, the Scottish Parliament (
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/)
provides a written record of virtually anything that any MSP has said in a
committee or plenary discussion since 1999, as well as a full record of written
and oral evidence to committees. Again, there is too much information to
browse, so you first need to think about what you want to know.
Newspapers
Lexis Nexis (which can be
accessed through library resources) is a key archive of UK newspapers and can
track the Scottish papers to some extent (it is OK for Scottish papers like the
Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record and Press & Journal, but it does not store
Scottish editions of the UK papers like the Daily Mail). The archive varies,
with papers like The Times providing the longest stretches of data (the
Scotsman has also begun to archive its really old material). Again, to make the
search manageable (below, say, 1000 stories), you need to be very specific
about what you want. For example, a search for Scotland AND referendum AND
independence will produce thousands of stories which will take you days to get through
(unless you focus on a short space of time).
Blogs
Blogs are a minefield. Consider
the extent to which they meet the gold standard criteria I outlined above. Some
of them might do, but how would you know? I would treat blogs in the way that I
might treat newspapers: you might trust them if they have a good reputation
(but, then, whose opinions do you trust on reputations?). You should also
expect biased, and often highly biased, opinions. That means that they can be a
good source of information, but you might ask yourself if you can rely on a
blog on its own, or as something to be compared with one or more sources. Interestingly
(for me at least), along with my co-author on the 2nd ed of Scottish
Politics, Neil McGarvey, I had to come up with a list of websites to check out.
The idea is that they would be relatively useful, but is this list (below)
particularly reliable? Or, are they simply the ones that came to mind at the
time?
SCOTTISH POLITICS BLOGS
Twitter and other things
I tend to use Twitter as an
alternative to the TV, as an additional source of entertainment. However, it is
possible to sign up to a wide range of news and party sites and to use twitter
as an alternative to reading newspapers page by page. This provides you with a
new source of bias, but perhaps no more problematic than sticking with a paper
like the Daily Mail. You might even simply follow specific lists (such as
academics on twitter) or, if you are feeling particularly lazy, just look at
the list of people/ organisations I follow and piggyback on that. There are things that are particularly useful,
such as the LSE blog sites and accounts such as ‘Writing For Research’ which
you might find more useful if you progress to postgraduate work.
And finally ..
Here is a list of websites that
Neil and I produced for our book. It is likely to be a bit scattergun and
biased (for example, we don’t list small party websites), and some will already
be out of date, but there may be some sources there that you wouldn’t otherwise
consider.
EXAMPLES OF POTENTIALLY USEFUL
WEBSITES ON SCOTTISH POLITICS
(from the chapters of the
forthcoming 2nd ed. of ‘Scottish Politics’ by Paul Cairney and Neil
McGarvey)
The idea here is that these
websites might get you started if you don’t want to rely on a scattergun search
engine search. It is not a particularly well-thought-out list, so be careful!
DEVOLUTION
SCOTTISH
ECONOMY
SCOTTISH SOCIETY
POLITICAL PARTIES
ELECTIONS
PARLIAMENT
SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT
GOVERNMENT BEYOND THE CENTRE
INTEREST GROUPS
SCOTTISH PUBLIC POLICY
INTERGOVERNMENTAL ISSUES
FINANCE
CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES
AND FINALLY again
Maybe you have read this far to see what we can
say about Wikipedia. My view is that I am sometimes pleasantly surprised about
what I see on some of those pages. However, you will find very few academics
that will trust your information if your source is Wikipedia (partly because it
is difficult to know who is providing the information, how they got it, how
well they cite that information, and how easy the information is to edit and
manipulate). Maybe a good rule of thumb is that you look at it for a short cut
to information, but that you do not rely on it as your definitive source.
