Part Two: The Literature SearchPlease note that this webpage has been largely superseded by another webpage I've posted as a supplement to my book (as yet unpublished) on "Historical Method in the Study of International Politics." That new webpage, on "Identifying the Scholarly Literature," deals with international politics as a whole, not just with the Cold War period. It's available in two versions, a general version and a UCLA version. I've also posted a list of links given in that new website. But I'm still maintaining the present website. It was last revised in July 2007.
CONTENTS OF THIS PAGE:Getting your bearings in a new field
Syllabi, Department ListsGenerating references
RLG/Eureka; Social Science Citation Index; Journals available electronicallyPrinted Bibliographies and Research Guides (plus a few bibliographies on the internet)
When you do historical work, it's important, especially at the beginning of a research project, to know what's already been written in the area you're interested in. The main reason, of course, is that you would like to learn what you can about the topic as efficiently as possible. But there's another and perhaps less obvious reason why a command of the scholarly literature is important: it is by analyzing that literature critically that you get some sense for the interpretative "lay of the land." What are the basic issues people seem to be arguing about? What are the most important books and articles in this particular area, the ones that seem to set the terms for scholarly debate? What's to be made of the quality of the discussion--indeed, the quality of the works in that area--and what room is there for saying something new and important?It's very important to develop a sense for what the issues are in a particular field, for what the conventional wisdom is, and for which writings dominate a specific area of scholarship. Scholarly work is a social process. Confronting other people's interpretations of a specific topic will help you sharpen your own interpretation as it is taking shape, and developing a sense for what's already been said--for the claims that dominate the field--will help you decide how to pitch your own discussion of the issue when you write up your findings. After all, you can't just plunge into a new topic in a totally mindless way. You need to figure out some way to approach the topic--that is, some sensible way to direct your efforts. But before you can develop that kind of strategy, you first need to get your bearings in what for you may be an entirely new field. And the best way to do that is to develop a certain familiarity with the existing literature in that field.
GETTING YOUR BEARINGS IN A NEW FIELD: How do you go about getting a feel for the intellectual landscape in a given area? You're generally not working on a totally blank slate here. You already know something about the general field from coursework you've already done. Indeed, you've absorbed a good deal of conventional wisdom about the past simply by virtue of having grown up in a particular culture. Only occasionally do you come to a new field knowing essentially nothing of value, and in such cases certain basic reference works can give you a rudimentary introduction to a subject--in particular, by identifying and discussing the key works in the field.
When I first started working on the Cold War period in 1979, for example, I realized I knew next to nothing about nuclear strategy, which was obviously an important subject for any student of the Cold War, so I took a look at the section on strategy in the Foreign Affairs 50-Year Bibliography (which came out in 1972 and which now, unfortunately, is a bit out of date). I also read the article on strategy in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (which happened to be written by Bernard Brodie, although at the time I had no idea how important he was), and I also checked out the other articles in that Encyclopedia listed in the first article as cross-references. Those two sources, which obviously had to be highly selective in the overview they presented (and this was a very good thing at that point), gave me my start. I did the same sort of thing recently when I wanted to learn a little about the theory of historical inquiry--the question of objectivity, various problems of historical epistemology, and so on. I got my start here by reading the "philosophy of history" articles in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and similar sources. When you're just beginning to explore a new field, you have to start somewhere, and sources of this sort are as good a place as any.
Another way of seeing what's important in a particular area is to see what people who teach courses on the subject put on their reading lists, and it's possible nowadays to check out syllabi on the internet. (Click on the link for a number of good syllabi for international relations courses, plus a couple of diplomatic history syllabus banks.)
Normally, however, you start out knowing at least something about the general area you're going to be working in, and you don't need to bother with things that are too rudimentary. You just want to get a more sophisticated sense for what's going on in the field--what the debates are, what the major works are, and so on. How do you proceed?
Well, you don't absolutely have to do anything special, because a certain sense for the field will come as you do your regular bibliographical work, which I'll discuss in a minute. Books, and especially articles, on a specific topic will refer to the general literature in the area in a way that will enable you to see quickly enough what's important. Moreover, as you do this normal bibliographical work, you will see the same names cropping up over and over again. These are the important scholars. The work they've produced is what the field considers to be important.
But this kind of approach can be terribly time-consuming, and in general since your goal is to produce as good a piece of work as you can within the limited amount of time you have available to do it, you will normally want to approach this part of your job in a more efficient and thus more active way. There are certain techniques that will enable you to separate the wheat from the chaff relatively quickly; these are the techniques--they're often just tricks or shortcuts--you will want to master.
So how do you go about identifying the major works and debates quickly? You'll probably want to begin with surveys of a field that are both highly selective and evaluative--not that you should necessarily accept the assessments given at face value, but the mere fact that a book is singled out for discussion is an indication of its importance. Review articles of this sort are a common feature of the scholarly literature. The journal Diplomatic History, one of the most important journals in this area, publishes such articles on a regular basis. There are also two collections of such articles, surveying various areas of the field, that you should know about:
Gerald Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (1981)
Van Pelt E183.7 A56. [Note: Van Pelt Library call numbers--Van Pelt is the main University of Pennsylvania library--are sometimes given in this guide; the same call numbers are frequently used in other libraries using the Library of Congress cataloguing system.]Michael Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (1995)
Van Pelt E744 A486 1996You might also want to take a long at one of the better surveys of American foreign policy (or of international politics) covering the Cold War period--especially if it has a bibliographical essay. One recent work is particularly good for this purpose:
Warren Cohen, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 4: America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991 (1993)
Van Pelt E183.7 C24 1994 v. 4Even if you didn't know that Cohen was a major figure in the field, you could see from the title that this was a highly respectable work. Someone asked to write a volume in something called the "Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations," given the prestige of Cambridge University and thus of the press associated with it, would have to be a relatively important person in the field, someone whose judgments about work produced in the field would carry particular weight.
One can also approach this problem from the other end--i.e., not from very general surveys of a large subject, but from detailed monographs (and especially dissertations). One trick here is to get a monograph dealing with a subject you're interested in, but which begins its detailed coverage at a slightly later point in time. A book of this sort may well have an introductory chapter or section dealing with the immediately preceding period; the discussion there will be highly selective and references given there will probably give you some important leads. Dissertations, especially those that relate directly to the subject you are interested in, usually have good bibliographies and often have a section which discusses the scholarly literature in the field; I'll talk a little later (in the section on UMI) about how to identify and get hold of dissertations that might prove useful. Basically your goal in all these endeavours--using monographs and dissertations, review articles and syllabi and bibliographies in survey books--is to save a lot of time by piggybacking on the work (and on the intelligence) of others.
GENERATING REFERENCES: Once you've settled on a particular topic, you might want to generate a fairly extensive list of books and articles that have been written on that topic. How do you go about doing that? Let me begin by discussing how you identify first books and then articles using the electronic search engines at hand--your regular university library catalogue, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) catalogue (also called "RLG/Eureka"; formerly called "RLIN") for a broader data base, and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Historical Abstracts/American History and Life. Then--still sticking with the electronic research tools--I'll talk about how to find and use dissertations, and allude briefly to the electronic finding aids for book reviews. Finally, I'll describe various printed bibliographies and research guides, and in this context I'll list some bibliographies found on the internet. You obviously don't have to use all of these, especially if all you're doing is an undergraduate research paper. But it's good to have a sense for what sources are available.
Your regular university library catalogue is the obvious place to start. Practically all these catalogues are computerized nowadays, and this results in a tremendous saving of time, at least once you learn the ropes. There are all kinds of things you can do with computerized catalogues, and things seem to be changing all the time, but let me discuss the techniques I've found most useful.
One of the first things you want to do is a subject search. This sounds simple enough, but how do you find the exact term to search for? With computers, if you are off by so much as a hyphen you may end up with nothing. The answer is simple. You just get any book--if necessary, the books listed in the standard bibliographies which I'll tell you about a bit later--and you do an author or title search on that book. Then call up what in the Penn Library catalogue is called the "detailed view" and at UCLA is called the "detailed record" by clicking on that link. Most other computerized catalogues have something equivalent; in the MELVYL catalog, the union catalog for the University of California system, you'd click for example into the link for "details/locations." That "detailed record" listing has links to all the subjects this particular book is listed under. Click into them and you're searching everything the library has listed under that particular subject. Of the books on that subject list, call up the most interesting listings, click into the "detailed record" for those, and you'll get yet more searchable "subject" leads. Or you can start by doing a subject search on one of the main statesmen involved in whatever you happen to be interested in; go into the "detailed record" for the most interesting titles that come up and you're off and running. Or you can do a search with what turn out to be standard subject entries in our area, e.g., "United States--foreign relations--Germany," and the equivalent.
Now, of course you can transcribe the interesting entries by hand, but it's very easy to just select the books you're interested in--often by just clicking a box to the left of the listing--then save what you've selected, and then at the end of the session print out your whole saved list, call numbers and whatever else you want, or save that list to a disc or to your hard drive. Or you can email it to yourself.
The other main catalogue you should know about is RLG/Eureka, the catalogue for the Research Libraries group, which pools listings from a large number of major U.S. libraries. (This is also sometimes called "RLIN.") At UCLA, go into the Melvyl webpage, click into the "other catalogs" link on the top right, and then select "RLG Union Catalog." For most purposes, a simple search is all that is necessary, and the RLG system is easy enough to use. You can begin by doing a search for some book whose title or author you know, or some subject (like the name of an individual) where you know there will probably be references. Then select the headings that interest you, click the box for "brief" or "full," and then save the titles you want to save. To email, print or save your saved list, click one of the links at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions you're then given.
The full view for a particular title, moreover, lists the subject headings that that book is listed under, and since these are linked you can do your subject search in the way I just described for ordinary university library search engines. The new titles that turn up in this way as you spread out into more and more subject lists can be saved or emailed or printed in the same way. If you're at one of the University of California campuses, you can find out if your own library has a particular book that's turned up, or you can put it an inter-library loan request for it, by clicking the orange "UC-elinks" icon in the full view for that title.
Now, what about articles? Articles are an important source. They are somewhat less formal than books--more a product of an ongoing process than something that is produced at the very end of a long project--and also tend to be more pithy. In articles far more than in books, moreover, authors like to begin by talking about how what they are about to say relates to what other people have had to say on the subject; the beginnings of articles often therefore tell you a lot about the shape of the field as a whole. And of course there are a lot more articles than there are books. But how do you identify them?
SOCIAL SCIENCE CITATION INDEX (part of the "Web of Science"--the link will work only if your library is a subscriber). There are various ways to locate articles on a given subject, but the Social Science Citation Index is my favorite. The online version covers articles that have been published from 1975 on. The basic goal of the SSCI is to generate a "web of citations." Once you find a particular article, the SSCI will give you a list of the all the references cited in that article. You can then look up those references and see which articles were cited there. You can then go the other way and see where your original article was cited, or where the new articles you were referred to were cited. From practically any base, you can rapidly spread out in both directions. You can thus get a quick sense for a field, especially a sense for which articles were important (i.e., the most widely cited ones). For a brief discussion of how the SSCI works, click here.
DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS: Dissertations are useful for all kinds of reasons. The most important one, of course, is that they present serious work based on extensive research. But they also as a rule have excellent bibliographies, lists of sources, and reviews of the scholarly literature. Getting hold of a good one enables you to use a kind of shortcut in your literature search: the author has in effect done a good deal of your work for you. This also enables you to do a bit of quality control on yourself: in your own literature search, have you missed any important sources that another scholar had been able to turn up? And there is one great thing about dissertations: unlike most unpublished works, they're very easy to identify, and very easy to get hold of, thanks to a company called University Microfilms Incorporated, or UMI, now part of ProQuest. Your basic entree into their data base is Dissertation Abstracts, which is available online at most university libraries. For a discussion of how to get into this source and how to use it, click here.
BOOK REVIEWS: There is one last set of electronic sources that you may find of some use in your literature search. Suppose you've done your book search and have identified a number of books you think might be important. Before you take a look at them yourself, you may want to get a rough sense for what they are about and how they have been received by other scholars. Or you might want to do this at some later point in your project to see how your own judgment corresponds to the views of the experts. That means that at some point you might want to do a book review search. For guidance on how to find book reviews in the scholarly literature, click here. Various online sources are listed in AcqWeb's Directory of Book Reviews on the Web. This has links to such sources as The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, The Boston Review, Le Monde - Livres, and so on.
GUIDES TO THE LITERATURE: Now let me give references for printed bibliographies and research guides, along with references to some bibliographic sources available on the internet. The first thing you should know about is that there are a couple of "bibliographies of bibliographies" on the open shelves in the Van Pelt reference area; other universities often organize things in much the same way, and if your university library uses the Library of Congress cataloguing system, these call numbers should give you some good leads to what might be available in your library's reference area. Each of these books has sections, easily identifiable from the Table of Contents, listing published bibliographies on foreign policy, international politics and military affairs (as well as on many other subjects, of course):United States History: A Selective Guide to Information Sources.
Annotated. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with diplomatic and military history.
Ref E178 B57 1994Bibliographies in History: An Index to Bibliographies in History Journals and Dissertations.
Vol. 1 cover the U.S. and Canada, vol. 2 the rest of the world.
Ref E178 B527 1988Next, there are a number of bibliographies and other reference works which deal essentially with international politics or U.S. foreign policy:
Robert Beisner, ed., American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature (2003)
Richard Dean Burns, ed., Guide to American foreign relations since 1700.
Ref E 183.7 G838 1983.Elmer Plischke, ed., U.S. foreign relations : a guide to information sources (1980).
JX 1417 P58.J.L. Black, Origins, Evolution, and Nature of the Cold War: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide (1986) E183.8 S65 B55 1986.
Michael Kort, The Columbia guide to the Cold War (New
York : Columbia University Press, c1998). UCLA: E744 .K696 1998There's also one extremely useful foreign source you might want to use. It's called the Bibliographie zur Zeitgeschichte, and it's put out as a kind of supplement to the main German journal for scholarly research in this area, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Don't be put off by the German if you don't read that language. This is a very well-organized list, put out over a two-year cycle, with works basically in English, German and French, it is very easy to use even for people who do not read much German.
There are a couple of general lists that you can find on the internet which might be useful:
The Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact's "Selective Bibliography on the Cold War Alliances" is also available online.
There are a number of bibliographies dealing with specific topics which for certain purposes might be quite valuable. See, for example:
Ronald DeVore, The Arab-Israeli Conflict
DS119.7 .D49Sino-Soviet Conflict: A Historical Bibliography
Ref DS740.4 S572 1985The United States in East Asia: A Historical Bibliography
DS518.8 U65 1985David Lincove, The Anglo-American Relationship
Ref E183.8 G7 L56 1988William Green, Soviet Nuclear Weapons Policy: A Research and Bibliographic Guide
UA770 .G735 1987Colin Gordon, The Atlantic Alliance : a bibliography (1978)
JX1393.N67 G67One trick you can use to identify bibliographies in a given area is to locate the subject heading your library (or RLG/Eureka) uses to cover books in that area, and then just tack on the term "bibliography." If books on Sino-Soviet relations, for example, are listed under the subject heading "Soviet Union--Foreign relations--China," you can do a subject search for "Soviet Union--Foreign relations--China--bibliography."
For U.S. military history, there are a few bibliographical guides and handbooks which in the Van Pelt Library at Penn are in the E181 section of the open shelves in the reference room; other libraries using the Library of Congress system may also have such sources in their reference rooms under the same or similar call numbers. See especially:
American Military History: A Guide to Reference and Information Sources
Ref E181 B63 1995A Guide to the Sources of U.S. Military History
Ref 181 G845 (with supplements)Note also Eliot Cohen's excellent list of core readings in strategic studies.
A whole series of bibliographies and other reference works deal with the Vietnam War. See for example:
James Olson, The Vietnam War: Handbook of the Literature and Research
Ref DS 558 V58 1993David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (New York : Columbia University Press, 2002) UCLA: DS557.5 .A54 200
And there's also a bibliography on the internet dealing with the same subject:
Vietnam War bibliography (Moise).
Well, those are your basic sources for leads. There are, of course, other things you can do, especially if you're really hard-core. For example, there is an email discussion group called "h-diplo," which is part of the h-net system of historians' email groups. The discussions in these groups are the academic equivalent of talk radio, and "listening in" can give you a feel for the kinds of issues people get passionate about--even a feel for the sorts of issues that drive historical work but are not discussed explicitly in the final product. People "let themselves go" more when they put in a post to something like this than if they were writing a formal scholarly article.
As I said before, you obviously don't have to do thorough searches in all these different areas, and how thoroughly you do your literature search depends on the nature of the project you're doing. For a dissertation you'll want to go into these things in a pretty heavy way. But for an undergraduate paper, it might make sense to do something fairly minimal. One of the basic techniques is to keep your eyes open for titles that constantly recur; this suggests what the most important works in a given area are. And remember that there are lots of shortcuts. For example, you'll notice that many of the books that turn up cluster around one or two call numbers; you can go to those places in the stacks and pluck off the shelves those books with newest binding, especially those put out by university presses, which you then look at especially for their bibliographies and footnotes. Another trick has to do with the "E183.8" call number in the Library of Congress system--this is the section for books dealing with U.S. relations with specific foreign countries. Call numbers beginning with E183.8 C, for example, are for books dealing with relations with China (C6), Cuba (C9), Chile(C3), and so on.
Now, having developed a list of references, you are in a position to start processing this material, using the technique for critical textual analysis discussed above. You start with the more important works you have identified--i.e., most frequently cited, or recent scholarly accounts--paying special attention to what their authors say about the status of the scholarly literature in this area. Look especially at introductions and conclusions: who do these authors say they are arguing against? what are their claims for their own works, in the sense of views they revise or big interpretive breakthroughs? You don't have to do any of this in a particularly massive way at the start of your project. You can always come back to this literature later if you have time--and indeed it makes sense to come back to the bulk of it later. When you have some mastery of the topic, you will be able to assess the literature more effectively. When you're just starting, it probably makes sense to focus on the major works, especially major interpretive survey-type works. But whenever you review this literature, be sure to come to it with these questions in mind: Is it your sense that the best works are adequate? Is there anything about the arguments they develop that you are not quite comfortable with? Do they use hitherto secret but now available sources? Do the different authors differ among themselves? All this is important not just in orienting your research effort in the sense of sharpening the questions you will be using to get at your material, but also (as I said before, but will repeat again, because it is so important) to give you ideas about how you will end up presenting your work.
Go to Part Three