These days, in addition to other books, I’m reading “Doing a literature review” by Chris Hart. Although its approach looks relatively familiar, as we were acquainted with lit reviewing at the light speed at the library school, “Doing a lit review” shows in detail how to do it properly. I wish I had this book a while ago when I really needed it. (I may need it again, though, in a few years, I suppose.) It also contains some useful information for librarians in the sense that, through performing a citation analysis of a plethora of books and scholarly articles, one can build a knowledge tree for a particular topic in a reasonable amount of time.

 

There is another book that I got my hands on, “Research strategies” by William Badke. I think that every librarian should read this book because it provides some very useful info literacy tips for those professionals who want to work in academic libraries, and likely other types of libraries.

 

I will discuss more about these two books as I am reading them.

 

Finally, I found a few books that will help me to improve my vocabulary and develop sophisticated sentence patterns—two problems that bothered me a lot, especially in the last year. I remember reading somewhere, probably quite recently, that using similar sentence patterns over an extended period of time reflects poor thinking, or rather limited, unchallenged cognition. Yes, the more I read about writing, the more humble I feel. However, there is a danger in being too humble since that may prevent me from writing any sentence, since putting thoughts into writing is such an overwhelming experience.