Overcoming obstacles in literature reading

I think most of us have similar problems or difficulties when we read literature. In the last part, let’s see how to overcome the common problems when we read journal articles.

Some of students may be impatient when read journal articles, especially for English journals. They tend to be oblivious and uncritical.

So how to be patient when you read English articles? First and the most important is to read more. When you read more, you can grasp different structures and formats for different types of the research. And also try to read the existing literature with questions in mind. What is your direction of the research? What questions do you want to ask? In the existing literature, have your research objectives already been answered? What are the differences in the extant scholarship?

The next important part is trying to enhance your own interest. If you have the interest in certain fields, you may become more patient towards the reading. For instance, some of you may have internship experiences in hospitality field. Then you find that the turnover rate is quite high for generation Y. In academic field, you want to understand why the turnover rate is quite high for generation Y. With this interest, you may become more patient in your literature reading.

The last is try to involve the interest in literature reading with your own imagination. To be imaginative about your research design and your research process.

How to overcome the problem of being oblivious?

There are several tips for you. For the classical literature, regular review is very important. If you find this study quite seminar, and it’s quite classical, In this way, try to have some regular reviews. Next, introducing literature to others or to your peer students is also a good way to improve your own memory. Also writing a summary of the literature or making notes are both effective and important. Lastly, try to associate the documents with familiar objectives.

For example, when you read a study about organizational structure, you may see different levels of the structure. In this case, if you want to understand the literature or theoretical stances, you can associate the theoretical framework with your own internship experiences.

Last and the most difficult is to be critical. This is not only difficult for students, but also for scholars.

To be critical is quite difficult part in academic field. So how to overcome the problem of being uncritical?

Firstly, when you read certain works, you may think how important this article is and why this article is important. Also, you can consider why the author came up with this topic? What is the context of the topic? And what research questions and objectives does this paper raise?

Do I have new ideas towards this topic? And what are the multiple ways to solve the problem? So to be critical, we need to know how to ask questions. As you can see, to overcome the problem of being uncritical, you need to ask different questions from different perspectives.

Lastly, as I have shown you previously, software can help you to sort literature and make notes. But some students may still prefer a manual summary. They may use word or excel document to make their own tables. This is one example. One student made the summary of an article. You can see how this student breaks down the article. By the table, the student divides the article into different items. Firstly, what is the article source? This column is for the source. Then what is the introduction? What method does this article use? What is the result for this article? Any extra notes or thoughts do you want to make for this article?

This is only one example of how students make manual table to understand the literature and to accumulate their own work.