As world experience shows, in the field of scientific and technical information, the main path of science runs primarily through scientific electronic libraries. Their purpose is to aggregate and organize access to modern knowledge represented by scientific publications. The criterion of a researcher’s information culture is the ability to adequately formulate the need for information in the entire set of information resources, to process information and create a qualitatively new one information (Booth, 2016; Booth et al., 2016). Sources characterizing the trends in scientific and technological progress in the area of interest – organizational leadership and management – can be divided into several groups (Fink, 2019):
1. Normative literature – sources that contain features of normative and legal information interpretation. Regulatory literature includes the following: laws, by-laws, international conventions, orders of the governing bodies of the industries and organizations, instructions, regulations, as well as guidelines. Since corporate leadership in general is not subject to regulation, the search for these sources will mainly include provisions on military leadership. The search strategy for these sources involves direct searches on the Google search engine for queries such as “military leadership regulation in the USA.”
2. Reviews of general literature – analysis and synthesis of published sources, the result of which are proposals, assessment of the situation in the field of corporate and military leadership on a global scale and the United States, prospects for the development of leadership concepts. This category of sources includes reports from consulting companies, articles in business editions such as the New York Times and Forbes. Particular attention will be paid to the practice of transformational leadership in organizations and military leadership in military units and military educational institutions of the United States. The search will be carried out on the websites of the relevant consulting companies and editions.
3. Reviews of scientific literature, in particular, presentation of analysis, generalization, and conclusions of published articles and books, describing the development of theories, but not affecting the experimental or practical use results. Search of scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as books on transformational and military leadership, related emerging trends, perspectives and challenges, will be conducted in global and national scientific libraries and databases with open access. In particular, these are JSTOR, Elsevier, Cambridge University Press, Sage, Wiley Online Library, Taylor & Francis, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global, ProQuest Research Library, WorldWideScience, Scopus, Google Scholar. Moreover, the search of books in the field under consideration will be conducted at Amazon website to see the newest and not yet published but announced books.
4. Reviews of literary sources of scientific and methodological nature – analysis, generalization, and conclusions of published articles and books, reflecting the development of the leadership research methodology and the results of their experimental or practical use. The search for these sources will be carried out in the same libraries and databases, which are indicated in the previous paragraph.
5. Reviews of literary sources of a scientific and hypothetical nature – analysis, generalization, and conclusions of published articles and books in various directions. The search for these sources will be carried out both in the same libraries and databases, which are indicated in paragraph 3, and using the Google search engine for “the latest developments in corporate leadership,” “the latest developments in the field of transformational leadership,” “a systematic review of modern theory and leadership practices,” “features, problems and perspectives of modern military leadership.”
Currently, there is a huge number of technological solutions and resources built on their basis, which to one degree or another satisfy the need for access to scientific information and, as a result, contribute to solving the urgent problem of the prompt dissemination of scientific research results. An important role in this belongs to aggregators of scientific information, such as the Web of Science (WoS) system, and the Scopus abstract database. First of all, it is necessary to formulate a list of search queries on the research topic, breaking it down into categories. Three major categories can be used – corporate leadership, transformational leadership, and military leadership. These categories, in turn, can be broken down into subcategories – the principle of categorization in this case corresponds to the method of grounded theory for formulating categories. Questions should be prepared as specific as possible, and then literature searches and future research project will be more manageable (Booth, 2016). This approach will allow thinking over and writing down questions for research, making a plan for searching for literature and its processing, evaluating and recording intermediate results, and revising and adjusting research plan as necessary.
The deductive method of information retrieval will be applied, in which the process of cognition proceeds from overall generalizations presenting a general pattern, to single judgments and facts. It is supposed to start with basic textbooks, especially those that have stood the test of time and have been reprinted several times. Either way, no textbook can be completely up-to-date, but best textbooks should at least the include discussions about the main ideas and concepts, supplemented by an overview of comments and criticism, as well as quotes from the works of those who have made significant contributions to the study field. Thus, the textbooks represent the starting point at the beginning of the review of sources and reflect the existing knowledge base.
It is necessary to browse the libraries for systematic, alphabetical, and subject catalogs. After identifying potential sources, the first step is reading the annotations to them to decide how close a particular source is to the research question. Having selected those sources that seem to be directly related to the subject of research, it is necessary to analyze the basic argumentation contained in them. It is equally important to carefully write down everything that is planned to be included in the final text (Harris, 2019). The result of search for special literary sources should be a written report, with a summary of the literature analysis with a preliminary assessment of the situation in the field of corporate and military leadership, both today and in the nearest prospect. In general, the synopsis is a concise summary of the author’s substantive provisions and conclusions without unnecessary detail. Definitions, new information, points of view of the author of the publication, the arguments are given, statistical data, as well as everything that can be used for this scientific work should be recorded briefly and accurately.
A comprehensive literature review should then be conducted to highlight the issue under study in more detail. At the same time, the following categories of sources should be distinguished, according to which the reliability, representativeness, and validity of the data presented in them can be determined (Ridley, 2016):
- Primary sources – original reports on the results of research carried out, in articles posted in academic journals, in collective monographs or materials of scientific conferences;
- Secondary sources – critical reviews or summaries of original research;
- Sources of the third level – as a rule, they represent generalizations of secondary sources, that is, textbooks in which a broad overview of the discipline in question is selected.
Thus, such an approach to the search for sources will facilitate the search for literature at further stages of the study, as a clear algorithm is formed. This algorithm facilitates overall research process and includes systematization of search criteria and search queries, search for online sources, and systematization of materials. At the same time, in the absence of a structured approach, there is a possibility of overlooking relevant materials and/or overlooking or misusing important information.
References
Booth, W. C. (2016). The craft of research. University of Chicago Press.
Booth, A., Sutton, A., & Papaioannou, D. (2016). Systematic approaches to a successful literature review. SAGE Publications.
Fink, A. (2019). Conducting research literature reviews: From the Internet to paper (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Harris, C. (2019). The handbook of research synthesis and meta-analysis. Russell Sage Foundation.
Ridley, D. (2016). The literature search: Strategies and tools for student researchers. SAGE Publications.