Quality

The literature you find when you start out serves mainly to track down facts and information. These facts are just the beginning, because no historical work consists merely of facts. Research papers are all about your interpretation of the facts: the way in which you structure them into a coherent narrative.

To evaluate literature, you need to distill the author’s interpretation from the facts. Although some historians make it look like they present nothing but facts, their work always contains a historical interpretation.

Make sure you know a little bit about the authors whose work you intend to use, about their methods and background. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is the work structured chronologically or thematically?
• When was the work first published?
• Who is the author? (biography, publications, education, reputation)
• Has the author published extensively on this topic?
• Can the author be seen as part of a particular historiographical tradition and does s/he apply a particular method?
• Was the work written from a particular national, religious, political or ideological viewpoint?
• What is the author trying to achieve?
• Who is the target audience?
• How does the author substantiate his/her arguments? Did s/he use a particular academic model or theory? Are his/her arguments plausible?
• What sources and literature did the author use?

Book reviews can help you find the answers to these questions, but beware. A review reflects only the opinion of the person who wrote it. Therefore, it is wise to consult several reviews of the same book. This gives you more information to evaluate the importance of the works you are going to study and to put them in their proper context.

Relevance

You must evaluate literature not only for its quality, but also for its relevance. This will enable you to select the chapters, excerpts or sections with a direct bearing on your research. This seems fairly obvious, but many papers have been marred by the inclusion of extraneous information that could easily have been filtered out. Continually monitoring for relevance allows you to answer your main research question or subquestions in the most focused manner. To assess whether a text is relevant, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the literature help you answer your main research question/subquestions?
• Does the literature answer the whole question/subquestion or just one aspect of it?
• To what extent does the thesis statement in the literature match your own main research question?
• How closely does the research topic or the analysis in this text resemble yours in your paper/thesis?
• Is the context of the research topic the same as yours?
• When was the literature first published and when was the research it is based on carried out?
• Do the findings and interpretation in this text correspond to those in other literature? Or do the findings and views in this text contradict other research?

Bear in mind that it is highly unlikely you will find scholarly literature that answers your main research question and subquestions in their entirety; you will seldom come across a text that reports on the exact same research or topic that you are tackling. If all your information could be taken from a single source, your research would be superfluous. In any case, sound historical research is always based on more than one source.