Hey there everyone.
I just started a graduate program and I realize while I have done an acceptable amount of reading on some topics there are other areas of interest I am just woefully unfamiliar with the scholarship on.
I guess I wanted to ask if anyone here had particular tips or insights into how they identify the key scholarship on any particular topic, both older and more recent without actually being explicitly told by somebody else what those works might be.
That is of course assuming there is a way to get a handle on that sort of thing in a particularly efficient or effective way.
I just recently was asked a professor for reading recommendations for a historiographic analysis regarding the Stalinist purges, and it occurred to me that I didn’t have a process for or much experience in identifying what those works might be myself without being explicitly directed to them by another.
I just have this vivid image in my mind of trying to get a handle on the scholarship surrounding a topic only to find I have somehow missed an important scholarly work in the area and end up looking like a fool.
I would very much like to avoid that happening. Which is why I’m asking if any of you fine folks have any insight or tips you might offer me.
Find the works that you have at hand and go to the bibliography or works cited page (or, I guess, Google Scholar). Follow that up: see what sources the works being cited cite themselves. It won't give you the latest scholarship, but when you see what sources most people are citing, you're going to zero in on what the key works are that everybody either cites because they're essential or are so important in the field that people feel the need to address what that person said in their own books and essays.
There's no way to get around the reading, and the potential is that you might get sidetracked by some pop history work that has an outsized influence on the field just because later scholars feel the need to point out how wrong it is - there's no substitute for actually doing the reading. But it really does come down to chains of citation, often going back to what primary and secondary sources that the real scholars in the field are leaning on as the core of the corpus.
When you get really deep into the subject, discrimination increases; just because everybody cites X book/article/whatever doesn't mean it is the best source on the topic - just the most popular. If I wanted to talk about textual criticism of H. P. Lovecraft, for example, my go-to wouldn't be the brand-new in 2019 New Annotated Lovecraft Volume 2, it would be the scholarly Variorum edition - which is quite a bit more scarce and a touch more expensive, but actually does text comparisons. And beyond that, I might even suggest looking up the primary texts themselves (where available - quite a few are digitized these days). But nobody writing an article about Lovecraft on some pop-culture blog is going to pick up the Variorum edition, they'll go with whatever they can google or on the shelf at the nearest bookstore.
And there's an argument to be made there on the impact of a given article with regards to its availability as opposed to its utility; if you need a translation of a Classical Greek or Latin work into English, you might go for the one you can readily access through the internet rather than the one buried in a possibly obscure and expensive publication, even if the latter is the better or more definitive translation. That's meat for the citation impact/analysis crowd. From a pragmatic standpoint, if you want to get sped up on something you need to really build up a list of the works that people are citing and then read those - and go out from there. The latest research is always going to be fringier stuff, just because nobody's had time or interest to cite it yet. Doesn't mean it's in any way bad, just hasn't had time to really make an impact yet.
I like to find a fairly recent PhD dissertation related to the topic. They often have pretty comprehensive literature reviews--exactly what gets cut out for the eventual book.
...And they are solid resources BECAUSE so many people (advisor, committee) besides the author have gotten ahold of them. And pointed out what books and articles the author missed. ;)
In other words: never be afraid to ask an expert!