Reading #2--reading the literature ("The Literature")

As graduate students, we are required to read something called "The Literature".  Until I started this post, I never really cottoned to the fact that how we speak, often reverently, of The Literature actually does require the use of upper case.  It is one of the quirks of science.

So, what is The Literature and why is it so important to read it?  Of course, the literature (I will revert now to a more sensible style) consists of all the books and journal papers--sometimes even commentaries--written on the general topic of our chosen subdiscipline within geology.  This is one area where I'm reluctant to use my own career as an example because my work has incorporated elements of just about every topic in geology except, I think, metamorphic rocks and structure, and not a few elements of biology, atmospheric science, and oceanography.  So for the time being, let's assume I've spent my career working on eolian sedimentary rocks and associated deposits (my current project).  If that were true, the literature would consist at a minimum of sedimentology in general; eolian sedimentology in particular; some fluvial sedimentology, especially braided-stream processes; carbonate sedimentology; isotope geochemistry (at least, for the carbonate rocks); and arid-climate paleoecology.  For starters.

That is a lot of reading, and it would be the bare minimum.  No serious scholar confines him/herself to the bare minimum.

Why is it important to read the literature in your field?

(1) Probably the most important reason is to make sure what you are doing, or intend to do, hasn't already been done.  I almost quit graduate school when I started reading the literature.  I would get an idea, think it out a bit, then read the literature.  Invariably, it seemed, the work I thought I would do had already been done by someone.  (The way to break new ground was staring me in the face, but that's another story.)

(2) Another important reason to read the literature is to understand the importance of your work.  Suppose you have an idea for research and that research does not appear to have been done.  How do you know your research will be a real contribution?  One can think of an infinite number of research projects whose results would be, in the end, trivial (some of them even get published).  On the assumption you don't want your work to be trivial, the only way you are going to know how your research will move the science forward is to see where the science needs to move forward.  "Forward" might be extending in a significant way a particular line of research, filling a gap, or testing an assumption that everyone has had to make up to the point you're starting out.  You find those places for extension, gap-filling, and assumption-testing by reading the literature.

As a special case of this, you might be studying rocks no one has studied before.  You might feel that is sufficient.  You would be wrong.  Such studies do not necessarily advance the science; most such studies end up being either special cases that do not apply elsewhere or application of well-established techniques without finding anything that isn't already known from elsewhere.  A lot of MS theses and not a few PhD dissertations fall into this category.  This is why journals are so insistent on field studies not being "regional", for example.  It's an easy trap to fall into.  I fell into it recently, and was appropriately dinged.  My paper wasn't even sent out for review because my co-authors and I had not taken our paper to the next level of showing how our work contributes broadly.  As a journal editor, I've dinged other authors on the same grounds, so I should have known better.  In order to make our work more relevant, we had to go back into the literature and expand both the introduction and discussion.  In other words, what we did to the rocks wasn't the problem.  The problem was, we hadn't provided a broader context.  The information we needed to do so was in the literature.  (By the way, this is very common.  We knew the context, but we failed to demonstrate it.)

(3) A third reason to read the literature is so you can give credit where credit is due when you write your paper.  It is exceedingly rare for scientific papers to be so revolutionary that they do not have precursors.  It is so rare that, should you find that is the case, you should state explicitly that the literature, so far as you could determine, contained no relevant studies--and you'd better be right.  Yes, that old guy who published a paper in 1979 (or even 1929) may not have seen all the ramifications of an idea, but that doesn't mean the glimmering of insight he had should be overlooked.  (Accessing and citing the literature will be the subject of a different post.)

In summary, despite the fact that it is a lot of work, spending time in the literature is crucial to what we do as scientists and scholars and should not be given short shrift.