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Four ways to read academic literature at a speed
Zhang Wenjing
It is common and important to use the views of other scholars or classical theories as theoretical or practical support in the essay writing process. Many authors of papers have a headache when they are faced with these documents, extracting information that can be "used for me". A big part of the headache is a sense of insecurity: I may feel that I need to read the articles from cover to cover before I am "qualified" to extract the information I need or to be able to use them safely. Although this situation can make you "feel at ease", it will reduce the overall writing efficiency, lengthen the writing front, and definitely make you physically and mentally exhausted. In addition to this, some novice authors are indeed helpless in the face of these documents, and how to extract the necessary information efficiently and accurately is undoubtedly one of the obstacles they face in the process of writing papers. In fact, neither novice nor reassuring authors have mastered the method of quickly compressing the original document. So much so that when you see a document or a work on classical theory, you don't know where to start with the literature, and you can only see the end from the beginning. If the journal literature is acceptable, if it is a book, it may really feel like the cart is turned upside down. Therefore, for the original documents at hand that can be "used for my own use", the authors have to learn how to compress them.
In one of the humanities and social sciences research methods series, "Top Ten Literature Reviews: Wonderful Principles and Examples", there are six review methods, namely, extraction, editing, description, reduction, merger, and writing. Although this book focuses on literature review and review research papers, the six methods presented in this paper still emphasize the relationship between the citation and the original corpus in the paper. Therefore, these six methods are not only applicable to reviews, but also to literature citations in general. This article will focus on the fourth method, "shrinking".
What is "shrinking"? Condensation, that is, compression or condensation, is to reduce the useless information in the literature, and can compress the data of tens of thousands of words of the original materials in very concise language to improve the information density. The article says, "Shrinking can make the literature thin and fine, in order to achieve less quantity and high quality, and strive to ensure the logic of the literature in terms of content and structure, and the content is reduced to a fraction of the length of the document, or even one thousandth." Therefore, the requirement for "shrinking" is to extract high-quality information on the basis of ensuring that the logic of the content and structure is consistent with the original document. The units of "contraction" include sentences, sentence groups, paragraphs, sections, articles, and chapters, and the basic unit of contraction is paragraphs. When compressing the article, the information can be extracted based on each compression unit, which solves the inefficient dilemma of the author from the beginning to the end. Therefore, according to the compression unit, the methods of compressing the original literature are divided into abstract extraction method, outline and listing method, key word syntax method, and content summary method.
1. Abstract extraction method
As the name suggests, this method is mainly used for direct re-extraction of the abstract content of the paper and the summary of the work. The abstract of an academic paper and the executive summary of the work are the result of the author's condensation of the content of the book, and the perfect form of abstract must be to summarize the conclusions or opinions of the article or work, so if the point of view can support the point of view in your article, you can directly borrow it completely, or extract it again according to your own needs, and select dozens or even one or two hundred words from the content of about 400. Here's an example.
Original:
The distinction between public and private morality and its discussion has always been one of the focuses of moral philosophy. Academics generally divide morality into public and private characteristics according to the field where morality plays a role and the boundaries of the crowd, and define "public morality" as the political and social morality applicable to the public sphere of society, and define "private morality" as the personal morality that individuals abide by in the private sphere. For this reason, the "distinction between public and private morality" may be rooted in China's emphasis on political morality over personal morality since modern times, resulting in "the loss of due balance between political morality, social morality and personal morality" (1), and the root of the imbalance can be traced back to the Confucian ideological framework of "family under heaven". ……
Public-Private Reversal: The Mechanism of Moral Practice in Contemporary Chinese Society
Citation:
Abstract:According to the definition of modern Western scholars, personal morality is only related to oneself and does not involve the behavior or quality of others, but in fact, most of the ancient Chinese virtues are not purely personal virtues, but most of them are related to attitudes towards others. With regard to public morality, ancient Chinese society did not have the public morality and etiquette required by modern social and public life. Although Liang Qichao was influenced by Japan's emphasis on public morality in modern times, unlike Japan's public morality construction, which mainly pointed to public morality, the public morality he called for focused on civic morality, that is, political public morality. Although civic morality and public morality can be collectively called public morality, in fact, in a stable and mature modern country and society, the internal order needs more public morality. The special process in modern China has led to a great deal of attention to political and civic morality, while the concept of public morality and its promotion have been neglected. The biggest problem in modern times is that political morality replaces personal morality, suppresses personal morality, abolishes personal morality, and correspondingly ignores social morality, so that the balance between political morality, social morality and personal morality is lost. Therefore, restoring the independence and importance of individual morality, and vigorously advocating social morality, is the key to reflecting on the moral life of contemporary China.
The Biases and Disadvantages of Valuing Public Morality over Private Virtue in Modern China
The original article is from the article "Public-Private Reversal: The Mechanism of Moral Practice in Contemporary Chinese Society", which mainly explores the public-private moral relationship in China under the contemporary society. In the literature review part of the preface, the author needs to sort out the relevant research on the debate between public and private morality, and at this time, it has to involve the citation of literature views. You need to find relevant literature. Authors can easily find relevant literature through CNKI's keyword search. One of them, entitled "The Tendency and Disadvantages of Valuing Public Virtue over Private Virtue in Modern China", mainly discusses the relationship between public morality and private morality. This paper focuses on the views and regulations of modern scholars and modern legal policies on public and private morality, and summarizes the relationship between public and private morality. However, if you insist on reading an article with nearly 30,000 words of quotations and then extracting the overall view of the literature, you will undoubtedly increase the workload and do unnecessary work. At this time, you can browse whether there are any literary views presented in the abstract, and you can directly borrow the views summarized by the cited author from the full text, or further compress and refine the expression. Therefore, it can be seen that the "distinction between public and private morality" presented in the original text may be rooted in China's emphasis on political morality over personal morality since modern times, resulting in "the loss of due balance between political morality, social morality and personal morality", which is actually a compression and borrowing of the content of the views in the abstract of the citation. This method is actually the best and most practical method when reviewing the literature or looking for similar or identical points of view.
Second, the outline of the law
The outline means to grasp the main link of things, and it can drive everything. The main link in the writing of the paper can be understood as the structural framework of the paper, because the structural framework of the paper supports the most important part of the argumentation process of the paper. The structural framework of a paper is generally composed of the headings of the main text, that is, the table of contents, and the headings of the article are actually the meeting points of ideas, or the summary of ideas. In terms of words that are more suitable for essay writing, the headings of the text often present the context or point of view of the article, and these headings are connected together, which is to refine the scattered nodes into a more concise network of ideas and become a condensation of the full text of the literature. Therefore, the authors can compress according to the headings of the various levels of the body of the document.
Original:
Since then, scholars have gradually paid attention to the stigma formation mechanism of a particular tainted occupation. Zhang Yulei and Ren Fan explained the evolution process of the public's cognitive bias towards the image of chengguan, the public's negative attitude and behavior towards chengguan, the loss of credibility of the chengguan profession, and the stigma of the chengguan profession[26]; Xie Heping and Tian Xiaohong......
The Formation Mechanism of Professional Stigma as Tour Guides: An Exploratory Study Based on Grounded Theory
Quotation section frame:
1. Manifestations of the stigmatization of urban management
(1) External stigmatization of urban management
1. Cognitive bias of the image of urban management
2. Negative response to urban management law enforcement.
3. Bad radiation to the government.
Analysis of the Formation Mechanism of Urban Management Stigma and the Path of Destigmatization
The author of the original article presents the current status of research on the formation mechanism of occupational stigma of other occupational groups in the literature review part, in which the author cites the literature on the formation mechanism of urban management stigma and the path of destigmatization. This paper presents the manifestations and formation mechanisms of urban management stigmatization, as well as the path selection of destigmatization. The structure of the article is also relatively clear, and the headings of the three parts at all levels can clearly reflect the context and ideas of the whole article argumentation process. Therefore, the author of the original article easily obtains the more important views on the manifestations of stigma from the structural framework of the cited literature, that is, the public's "cognitive bias of the image of chengguan, the negative response to chengguan law enforcement, and the negative radiation of the government's trust", and directly extracts them for his own use. If the abstract of an article is written in a concise manner, and the more detailed points in the article are not covered in the abstract, you can start from the information compressed by the headings at all levels of the article to obtain the views that are more closely related to your own article.
3. Grasp the syntax of key words
Grasping key words and sentences is to grasp the key points and points in the literature, extract the main points of the literature, and select the most meaningful key words or sentences as the basis for "shrinking". In other words, grasping and extracting the most critical information from the literature is already the first step of compression, and then the process of organizing this information. The search for this information is not blind, you can look for rules, for example, the beginning or end of each part of the article is the topic sentence or summary sentence, which is the most important rule to grasp the syntax of key words. Authors can also focus on the beginning and end of paragraphs.
Original:
Since then, scholars have gradually paid attention to the stigma formation mechanism of a particular tainted occupation. Zhang Yulei and Ren Fan explained the ....... Li Jie and Wu Liangmu discussed the formation mechanism of stigma of high-prestige occupations (doctors, university professors, etc.) from the perspective of incidents: firstly, negative events related to high-prestige occupations were widely disseminated through direct experience, media influence, and social interaction, which led the public to question the social representation of high-prestige occupations, forming a stigma of high-prestige occupations; Secondly, as the stigma of high-prestige occupations is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, the public's attitude towards high-prestige occupations has undergone a negative change, resulting in the social status of high-prestige occupations. Lower, and then rejected and discriminated against by the public, evolving into the stigma of high-prestige professions; Finally, the stigma of high-prestige occupations reduces the public's cognitive, emotional, and evaluative identification with them [28].
The Formation Mechanism of Professional Stigma as Tour Guides: An Exploratory Study Based on Grounded Theory
Citation:
3 Mechanisms of stigma in high-prestige occupations
3.1 Origin and Spread of Events
Direct experience. Direct experience is obtained from the connection between the subject and the object that actually exists, and can continue to be applied to the personal practice of the same object with emotional cognition, which reflects the constituent content of the individual's intrinsic attributes (Zhao Baochun, 2012). ……
Media influence. The decline of print media and the development of the Internet have led to the rise of new media, which have a significant impact on information dissemination. ……
Social interaction. With the rapid development of the Internet and the establishment of personal network platforms, the dissemination of information in the network is an effective way of social interaction, and the interaction process is influenced by others as well as others (Yadav & Pavlou, 2014). ……
3.2 Characterization of high-prestige occupations
In the sixties of the twentieth century, Moscovici proposed the concept of social representation and defined it as a body of knowledge composed of values, images or conjectures that are independent of personal experience and persist in one's own culture (Moscovici, 1976). …… People question the social representation and actual experience of the original high-prestige occupation, so as to revise or reconstruct the social representation of the related occupation, and then form the stigma representation of the high-prestige occupation.
3.3 The moderating role of the event system
3.4 Stigmatization of high-prestige occupations
……
When one or more of these professions violate professional standards and act harmful to society, they are more likely to be over-interpreted by the public, and the stigma in the incident is radiated to the entire occupational group. Different from traditional attitudes that express discrimination and prejudice, high-prestige professional stigma carries more catharsis of negative emotions of the public.
3.5 Social Proof
Cognitive identity. Cognitive identity refers to the perception of the social identity of the profession to which the practitioner belongs in a high-prestige profession,......
Emotional identity. Affective identity refers to the individual's emotion towards the high-prestige occupational group and other members, and the emotional sense of belonging to the high-prestige profession, which is manifested in the sense of belonging to the profession,......
Evaluate and agree. Evaluative identity refers to the positive or negative evaluation of the profession to which the practitioners of high-prestige occupations belong, which is manifested in group self-esteem and the degree of respect shown by the public based on their perception of high-prestige occupations. ……
The Horse Evil: A Study on the Mechanism of Occupational Stigma Formation in High Prestige
In this article, in the literature review section, the author combs through another article on the stigma formation mechanism of high-prestige professions. Corresponding to the citation, if you want to sort out the ideas of the article in more detail, the abstract may not be able to meet your needs, and the title is only a macro view of "what is the formation mechanism", and what the specific point of view is, you still need to return to the content of the article. And how to extract ideas effectively and efficiently? You can see the beginning and end sentences of the content under the title of this article. For example, in section 3.1 of the quotation, the first subheading shows that the origin and spread of the incident is one of the keys to the formation of high-prestige occupational stigma. What is the origin of the event, what are the modes of transmission, and these key information needs to be obtained from the original text. At this point, the key information is presented first at the beginning of each paragraph, and there is no need to continue reading the following information, and the three key messages of direct experience, media influence, or social interaction can be extracted directly. If you want to extract ideas or information from the literature, and it is not reflected in detail in the abstract, and the information in the title does not meet your needs, you can start from the main sentence or summary sentence in the paragraph to grab the key sentence.
Fourth, the content summary method
This method is generally used to compress paragraphs or sentence clusters. Sometimes the information that needs to be extracted is only a part of the idea in the literature, or the core information in a few sentences or paragraphs in the literature, and this method can be used. In fact, we can understand this method as the simplest summary of the general idea of the paragraph. For example, the following example.
Original:
(2) The theoretical basis and practical logic of the evolution of Sino-US trade frictions to the field of "super-trade" under the background of the epidemic
The fundamental contradiction between China's rapid rise and United States hegemonism is the crux of United States' resolute containment of China's development and its continued provocation of conflicts and frictions, and the fundamental logic and theoretical basis for the evolution of Sino-US trade frictions to the field of "super-trade" are inseparable from United States' geopolitical competition thinking and domestic political logic[5]. Based on the idea of structural realism, the United States, as a conservative power, will have a strong sense of threat and competitive oppression against the rapidly rising China[6], and the structural contradictions between the two sides are prominent, so the United States continues to suppress China to avoid threats to its own interests and hope to achieve a redistribution of interests. ［7］
The Evolution of Sino-US Trade Frictions in the Context of the Novel Coronavirus Epidemic and China's Response
Citation:
(3) The game between emerging powers and established powers will be further intensified
The rise of emerging powers represented by China is not only an important factor influencing the future changes in the international economic pattern, but also an important part of the changes in the international economic pattern. China's total economic output continues to grow and will surpass United States to become the world's largest economy around 2030. At the same time, China's innovation strength is rapidly improving, its industries are constantly transforming and upgrading, and it is accelerating its climb to the middle and upper reaches of the global value chain, and its head-to-head competition with developed countries is intensifying. The entry into a high-income society of a large emerging country with a population of the same size as the population of the existing advanced economies combined will inevitably accelerate the transformation of the global economic landscape.
There is both cooperation and competition between the established powers represented by the United States and the emerging powers, and the game between them will intensify, making the situation more complicated and changeable. On the one hand, the major countries hope to share the development opportunities of emerging economies, and expect China and other emerging powers to share more international responsibilities in solving global issues, responding to global crises, and promoting world economic recovery. On the other hand, in order to maintain their leading position, the established powers will take measures such as suppression and containment to intensify the game with emerging powers. The 2017 United States National Security Report officially defined China as a "strategic competitor," and the U.S.-China relationship will undergo profound changes. Competition and cooperation are the norm of the great power game, cooperation does not mean that there are no contradictions, United States has begun and will continue to accelerate measures in trade, investment, finance, science and technology, security and other fields to contain China's development and rapid catch-up; Nor does competition mean all-out war, and both countries need to avoid strategic miscalculations. The ongoing interaction between the major powers has led to great uncertainty about the future outlook. What is certain is that the great power game will make the international environment in which China finds itself extremely complex, and will have a profound impact on the global economic pattern and the relationship between competition and cooperation.
Changes in the International Economic Landscape and China's Strategic Choices in the Next 15 Years
The original article is a discussion of Sino-US relations, and when talking about the theoretical basis and practical logic of the evolution of Sino-US trade friction to the field of "super-trade", the author first summarizes the theoretical basis and practical logic. Finally, he concluded, "Therefore, the United States continues to suppress China to avoid threats to its own interests, hoping to achieve a redistribution of interests." Finally, the author points out the essence of the Sino-US trade friction. The author of this substantive content needs to have a certain theoretical support to be more explanatory. Therefore, the sentence is presented in the form of a quotation. The author found this article, in which the author made a prediction of "the key factors that will affect the future changes in the international economic landscape". It mentions the game between China as an emerging power and the established power represented by United States. What is the essence of gambling? What are the United States considerations? The author explains this, and if you want to cite the ideas of this literature, you need to refine the essence of the game between United States and China. It is necessary to read this part of the information quickly, clarify the logical level of the part, extract the core content of each unit, and give an overall overview of the information at each level. This section highlights the intensification of the game between China and the United States, as there is cooperation and competition between China and the United States. The author divides into two aspects: first United States hopes that China will assume more international responsibilities, and second, United States maintains its leadership position by containing and suppressing China. A summary of the contents of this section then leads to the relevant information in the original text. This method requires the author to quickly capture part of the information in the citation literature and concise and summarize it.
If the author of the paper does not know how to compress the important information in the original document, he or she can practice it in combination with the four methods in this article. If you want to extract the core ideas in the original literature, you can first use the abstract extraction method; If the ideas in the abstract are too condensed, you can choose the outline method and the syntax of grasping key words; If you need to extract some of the information from the original document, you can directly use the content overview method.
(This article was first published on the website of the Institute of Research Writing, July 9, 2024)