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Dear Peter, Thanks for your reply. I’m reproducing the entire note because you raise so many issues. First, Victor was not advocating “annotated literature sets.” He is calling for developmental concept mapping through the literature of a field. The tools for this kind of conceptual development map are the critical literature review and the bibliographic essay. I had not earlier mentioned the bibliographic essay -- this is a medium common to the humanities and to history, but less common in the social sciences Victor is right. As you note, the literature review article is an important tool in advancing the knowledge of many fields. I’d have to ask across fields to learn whether this is as insignificant in medical research as you suggest. I observe that any kind of work that is recognized for tenure and promotion – as critical literature review articles are – tend be seen as significant contributions to the literature. The critical literature review was the subject of an extensive thread earlier this year, and I will return to this again. But a critical literature review is quite different to an annotated bibliography – for researchers past the doctorate, the critical literature review is a way of mapping concepts through the past to address the future development of a field. On several occasions, I have referred to a particularly useful article on the subject, Webster, Jane, and Richard T. Watson. 2002. “Analyzing the Past to Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review.” Management Information Science Quarterly Vol. 26 No. 2, (June), xiii-xxiii. There is also an excellent book: Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a Literature Review. Releasing the Social Science Imagination. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. The second point is that I was not advocating “annotated literature sets.” I advocate the value of the annotated bibliography under certain circumstances. If you’ve been reading the design literature, you likely haven’t seen annotated bibliographies of the kind I described, but these are the kinds of rich annotation and thick description that make an annotated bibliography a useful step on the way to a critical literature review or a bibliographic essay. These kinds of notes are more than didactic: they are useful stand-alone research tools. Such a tool is quite different to the curriculum reading list or contextual bibliography that accompanies most university courses. An annotated bibliography is a research tool. Third, the concerns I address here are those of researchers and research students. This thread is a series of comments on the research literature for those researchers and research students. I appreciate the concerns you raise with respect to practitioners and MDes students, but this list is PhD-Design, not MDes-Design. My purpose here is to strengthen the research base of our field. Thus my concern with effective and well structured annotated bibliographies, as well as with critical literature reviews. Fourth, there is no reason in an abstract sense to prevent a tool such as Zotero from being useful. The problem is the reality: it is an amateur effort that features poorly organized and uninformative contributions. I am puzzled by the repeated number of suggestions on this list that address the lack of practitioner-oriented tools for research and advanced professional development by suggesting wikis, wookies, wonkies, and any other kind of amateur tool resembling a Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney “let’s put on a show” movie from the 1930s. This kind of work doesn’t get done when everyone waits for someone else to write up an entry in the hope that each entry will attract another, with the final result being a useful document. Even if one entry did attract more – and the evidence is that this doesn’t often happen – it would still need editing, rewriting, and development to make a tool useful to practitioners. If this is a gap in our literature, why doesn’t someone do the hard yards and actually write and develop some of these tools – just as medical researchers write articles and prepare documents that practicing surgeons and physicians find useful. Zotero and things like it don’t work. To make them work would take more work than simply writing up some decent projects that practitioners can use. There are many who claim that design research does not serve the practitioner well enough. This is partly true. My challenge is to suggest that those who know what practitioners need write these documents rather than complaining about the gap in the literature. If there is a gap, fill it rather than demanding that those with a different research focus should shift their attention from the projects that require their efforts, knowledge, and skill. On a fifth and slightly different point, I appreciate Rosan’s suggestion that my faculty take the lead in developing a series of appropriately rich annotated bibliographies and critical literature reviews. I will look into this. Before I return to Australia, I’ll have a conversation with colleagues here in Delft to see who might like to join in such a venture. Best regards, Ken Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 39214 6078 | Faculty On Tue, 1 Nov 2011 08:41:20 -0400, Peter Jones | Redesign <[log in to unmask]> wrote: With the discussions about annotated bibliographies, reference lists, and exchange of references - I’m wondering whose concerns we are trying to resolve? Ken Friedman is advocating Victor Margolin’s interest in seeing the development of annotated literature sets for different design contexts. This could be considered an exercise in disciplinary development - and it would be a useful one for graduate students to contribute. If this were to develop a body of knowledge, advanced degree learners would find it very useful. They are the ones exploring the core and the edges of the literature under our guidance. Faculty already prepare contextual bibliographies with every syllabus. The course outline and the framing of problems in each session give context for the readings. Within courses and independent studies we may require annotated bibliographies. I have to say in my experience I have not ever seen an annotated bibliography as thorough as the review format Ken suggests. It’s a very didactic approach, and while useful at the PhD level for literature mastery, I think it’s too much for the MDes level, which is a practitioner degree. Consider other practitioner degrees and the level of learning and risk they must address in their professions - health sciences and engineering for example. I’ve been researching and designing information resources for medical education and biomedical research and I’ve seen no evidence of this level of literature review in the med schools and residencies I’ve observed. Medicine has become evidence directed to a great extent over the last decade or so (although evidence-based medicine is not the only modality, I see a universal reliance on high quality evidence for clinical decision making). Yet, the practitioners and learners themselves are not creating bibs – they (almost universally) are weaving readings into practice cases, holding journal club sessions with faculty, and are talking about controversies and exceptions in topical conferences. And yes, annotated materials are employed in these session, called review articles, a scholarly survey of the literature around a condition or clinical problem. Authors get credit for their publication, they are used in education, but the annotated bib per se is not a major learning device in medicine. There’s good support for this kind of problem-oriented sensemaking approach to learning literature and advancing knowledge. But the medical literature has a more canonical structure than design, and I’d include as well social sciences. The purposes of medical articles being reviewed are well-understood by their readers. But the purposes of design research and publication are usually oriented toward practice and problems - and design publication styles vary widely from the iconoclastic to the scientific. Like engineering, design is (more of) a problem-oriented discipline, and literatures are used for practical problem investigation more than didactic knowledge building. So perhaps we need to consider those purposes in new types of reviews that offer support to practitioners? What are we using literatures for? Why can’t a list of publications on Zotero become useful as an emerging reference resource as our contributions to it yield new insights, that in turn add annotations or commentary to the lists? Where is our sense of using design thinking to advance the tools of the trade, as it were? I have more to add to this, but I’d like to hear more about what the problems are these bibliographies are intended to address. Are they disciplinary development, literature mastery, or transdisciplinary problem solving? Best, Peter Peter Jones, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Faculty of Design Strategic Foresight and Innovation OCAD University http://DesignDialogues.com