Rising Scholars: Articles in Conversation

This guide is for students enrolled in RSCH S-12: Writing: How We Learn, taught by Tad Davies, Maggie Deli, and John Sampson. It is intended as an introductory toolkit to help you find and contextualize scholarly conversations that matter when pursuing your academic interests.

Before you can find and identify key articles—the publications at the center of important debates—you will need to survey what the people in various disciplines do, what they study, and their chief methods of inquiry. These sources should help you get started:

• Very Short Introductions offer concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects across most disciplines.
• HOLLIS is Harvard Library's primary research tool.
  • Use the filters to narrow your search to:
    • peer-reviewed articles.
    • your field/discipline of choice
    • recent years
  • Assess how substantial the debate seems to be. Are there just a few articles on the topic/question or a lot? 
  • Assess whether those discussing the topic/question are really in the field you’re addressing. 
    • Does the title of the journal suggest it is the field/discipline you’ve chosen?
  • What can you find about the author’s/authors’ credentials? Are they actually in the field/discipline you’ve chosen or some other? Are there relatively recent articles (is the debate still going on)?

Background sources like dictionaries, encyclopedias, and bibliographies, summarize the key areas of inquiry that occupy scholars in a given domain of study. They outline the central preoccupations within the field and point to the boundaries of its frontiers. Often called "reference works," these resources are a good first stop along your research journey to get your bearings. They offer overviews, authored by experts, that highlight key publications. Be sure not to skip them!

• Oxford Bibliographies
  Provides faculty and students alike with a seamless pathway to the most accurate and reliable resources for a variety of academic topics. Written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in the database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations. Offers a rapidly expanding range of subject areas, including education, psychology, and sociology, among others.
• Oxford Reference
  Contains dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. It is a fully-indexed, cross-searchable database of these reference books. A broad subject range of titles from the Oxford Companions Series is available, as well as The Oxford Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology. Search by keyword.

The article you select is likely to be indexed in library research databases. The following databases index the scholarly journal literature in a range of fields, often providing full-text access to research articles.

• Academic Search Premier
  A multidisciplinary database covering many fields of study, from anthropology to history, to education and women's studies; its breadth is helpful when you're not sure who is tracking a topic you'd like to explore (or the kinds of questions researchers tend to ask in a range of academic disciplines). It offers an assortment of articles - some scholarly, some not.
• Social Science Premium
  An index and full text database in the social sciences, including politics, sociology, and education.

Once you have found an article that you believe is central to an academic debate of interest to you, you can track the scholarship that emanated from it. Citation analysis is a key strategy for evaluating the relative importance of a publication. The following databases facilitate this process.

• Web of Science 
  A multidisciplinary database that allows you to search across nearly 10,000 widely read and often cited academic journals and magazines. Coverage is particularly strong in science related fields, including psychology. Use the CITED REFERENCES search tab therein to find how many times a paper has been cited and by whom. Tip: Use the sorting feature to prioritize the most highly cited articles among those that cited the original  article.
• Google Scholar
  Because it lists citation counts, use Google Scholar (with Harvard Library settings) to supplement your cited reference searches in Web of Science, above. Note that citation counts in Google Scholar tend to be inflated due to duplication.

In separate browser tabs, look up the following article (see citation) in each of these databases: (1) Web of Science Core Collection, (2) Google Scholar. Examine and explore the results. Then answer the questions below.

Citation:

Yeager, D. S., Dweck, C. S., & Kazak, A. E. (2020). What Can Be Learned From Growth Mindset Controversies? The American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794

Questions:

1. How many times has this article been cited according to Google Scholar?
2. How many times has this article been cited according to Web of Science?
3. Why do you surmise there are differences in the number of citing articles presented?
4. How does the way each tool presents results (e.g., sorting options, ability to navigate among cited and citing articles) differ?