Intelligence Gathering

Thirty sources in an hour

• You find one article that seems directly relevant. It cites twelve others.
• You track down three of those. Each cites fifteen more.
• Within an hour you have thirty sources and no idea where to start
• The instinct is to retreat: narrow the scope, keep three recent articles, hope
• The instinct is understandable and it is wrong

A map, not a checklist

• A literature review is not proof that you read enough articles
• It is a map of intellectual territory
• You cannot map territory from three landmarks
• The archivist mindset: searching and synthesizing as active cartography
• The process is identical whether your topic is livestreaming, news framing, health campaigns, or algorithmic bias

The conversation metaphor

• Imagine walking into a debate that has run for years
• Blurt out your point and you will be dismissed as naive
• You might be repeating an argument made a decade ago
• You might not know someone already tested your idea and it failed
• The review is how you earn the right to ask your question

What a review accomplishes

• It situates your work. You are not operating in isolation.
• It identifies a gap. This is the answer to “so what?”
• It prevents reinventing the wheel. Your original idea may be a dissertation from five years ago.
• Both defensive and generative: seeing the connections reveals angles you had not considered

Two more things it does

• It provides methodological guidance: validated measures, sampling strategies, analytical techniques, and other people’s limitations
• Krippendorff (2018) and Neuendorf (2017) compile decades of content analysis practice on coding, sampling, and reliability
• It refines your question. A vague curiosity about “Twitch chat” sharpens into a specific debate about whether engagement is driven by the content on screen or the social environment around it

Phase one: exploratory searching

• Start broad. You are answering basic questions.
• What terms do scholars use? Who are the key researchers? Which journals?
• Google Scholar first: less comprehensive, but fast and free
• Wikipedia is not citable, but its reference list is a doorway
• Collect promising sources in Zotero and tag liberally. Do not over-organize yet.

Phase two: systematic searching

Now the goal is comprehensiveness. Use the real databases:

• Communication & Mass Media Complete, the primary database for our field
• PsycINFO if your question touches emotion, persuasion, or cognition
• Web of Science and Scopus for multidisciplinary citation tracking
• Inside them, Boolean operators build precise strings

Building a search string

• AND narrows: both terms must appear. OR expands. NOT excludes.
• An asterisk is a wildcard: stream* finds stream, streams, streaming, streamer

(livestream* OR "live streaming" OR Twitch) AND
(motivation* OR gratification* OR engagement) AND
(viewer* OR audience* OR chat)

Three concept blocks, joined with AND, each with its own synonyms.

Keep a search log

Plain text, in your repository. For every search, record:

• The date and the database
• The exact search string, copied, not remembered
• The limiters you applied and the number of results
• How many you kept

It lets you defend the strategy later, and it shows you what is not working.

Phase three: citation chaining

• Find a few keystone articles, the ones that are clearly central
• Backward chaining: read the references they cite, the foundational works
• Forward chaining: use Google Scholar’s “Cited by” to see who cited them since, which shows how the conversation evolved
• The growth is a snowball, but a strategic one: you are following the network outward from what matters most

Recognizing saturation

Saturation is the point where more searching will not change your understanding. In practice it looks like:

• Three consecutive database searches returning zero new relevant articles
• New articles citing the same eight to ten sources you have already read
• Being able to predict what an article says from its title and abstract

It does not mean you read everything. Stop searching. Start synthesizing.

Our librarian is here

The rest of today

• Our subject librarian is going to run the databases with us, live
• This is the part you cannot get from a chapter: the interface, the limiters, the tricks that only come from doing it daily
• Have your topic and your search terms ready
• Interlibrary loan is free and faster than you think. Ask about it.

What to ask while you have them

• Which database is actually right for my question?
• How do I get the full text when the library does not subscribe?
• How do I set up a saved search and an alert for new results?
• What is the fastest way to export a batch of results into Zotero?
• Can I make an appointment later in the term when I am stuck?

Before next time

• The Librarian Visit Report is due next week, 50 points. Write it while the session is fresh, not Sunday night.
• The report wants your search log: databases, strings, results, what you kept
• Get Zotero installed and connected to your browser if it is not yet
• Read the rest of Chapter 4 on the literature map before Thursday
• Thursday we turn a pile of sources into a map, and a map into an argument