Lab 5

Objective of Lab 5: Understanding the Relevant Research Literature

What was the "intellectual context" for your authors' work? What did they know before they did the research reported in your article? This week you'll learn about this intellectual context and identify specific publications that you can cite as evidence for it. After Lab 5 you'll summarize the information gathered in Labs 3, 4 and 5 as Report 1. There you will cite one or more review articles that summarized what was known at the time of your authors' work (DO NOT cite the introduction to a research article for this purpose) and a few research articles that reported the specific observations on which their work was based. Once again, use your reference management software to carefully record the information you find during this lab.

Questions to Consider

On what prior observations was this research based?
What was and wasn't known at the time?

Research projects can take years from initiation to publication, so a review article published approximately five years before your article will provide a good description of its intellectual context. To learn about that context:

1. Reread the introduction of your article. It should include a summary of the intellectual context, as the authors understood it, with references to relevant research and review articles.
2. Find a review article on your topic that was published approximately 5 years earlier than the research article you are analyzing, preferably by someone other than an author of your paper. Your article may cite such a review. If not, use PubMed to find one by doing a subject search, restricted to review articles.

Use the key words listed underneath the abstract/ summary of your article to construct this search. If your search criteria are appropriate, you should retrieve the review article with which you began this project. Use the information provided by the earlier review to supplement that provided in the Introduction of your article.

Questions to Consider

Were many laboratories pursuing related research when the reported work was done?
Did they share the perspective presented by the authors of your article?

Often many labs work on the same (or related) questions. This helps to ensure that reliable answers are obtained ... not answers due to unidentified conditions particular to one lab. People working in different labs often have different ideas, making the research more creative. Each lab provides a piece of a bigger puzzle...like a jigsaw...as well as constructive criticism of the other's work!

1. To find related research articles by other authors, go back to your article's introduction and find the authors' citations for work that immediately preceded theirs.
2. Use PubMed to do a subject search, limited to the period 5 to 10 years before your article was published.
3. Scan issues of the same journal (or related journals) published around the same time. If many labs are studying the same topic, you may find related articles in this way.
4. Search Trellis for books on your topic. Sometimes conference presentations, published as books, give more information about ideas prevalent at a particular time than do research or even review articles.

Did you find other articles on the same topic? Peruse some to see whether they present very different perspectives. Go back to the review article in which you first found a reference to your article. Did the reviewer indicate any difference of perspective between your authors and other researchers?

Questions to Consider

What (major) question did the researchers ask?
What hypothesis did they test?
Why did they do this research?

Before examining the results obtained by your authors, you must clearly understand the question they asked (or the hypothesis they posed), and their reasons for asking it. This information should be stated in the introduction of the research article – and it is often restated in the discussion/conclusions article. It is essential to distinguish between the technical objective of a particular experiment (e.g. to determine the nucleotide base sequence of a particular gene) and the broader goal of the researchers (e.g. to determine the physiological function of the protein encoded in the gene, or define its mechanism). Ask your Professor or TA for help in "decoding" this information.