Engaging with the scientific literature

Engaging with the scientific literature

Teaching language: English
Course teaching load: 15hrs
Teacher: Professor Marion Fortin

Marion Fortin is professor in Human Resource Management at the Toulouse School of Management. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Trinity College, Dublin, and her HDR from the University of Toulouse. Since 2019, Professor Fortin is head of the Human Resource Management department. Previously, she has worked at Durham University (UK) and was a visiting scholar at New York University. Her main research interest lies in the role of fairness perceptions in the workplace, and how they are linked with morality and social context. Her current projects include research on the return experience of women after maternity leave and the fairness dynamics related to “tough decisions” in the workplace. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Business Ethics and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Researchers need to be able to identify a gap in the literature to engage a research agenda. The purpose of this course is to identify, understand and critically reflect on the existing literature related to a specific research topic. We will discuss practical questions such as how best to get started with a literature review, how to read an article and which online tools to use. Special attention will be paid to the challenges and promises of interdisciplinary work. In order to provide a useful treatment of these topics it is necessary for students to reflect on their own reading progress through a learning log and students will also be asked to conduct a “practitioner translation” of a research paper, in order to encourage them to reflect on the gap between the academic and the practitioner literature.

Intended Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

• Characterize what makes a good literature review 
• Criticize your own approach to reading papers and to searching academic literatures 
• Review fundamental themes in a field of research
• Outline the contributions that different types of empirical research can (and cannot) make
• Synthesize a review of the literature
• Specify how precisely academic literature can (and cannot) be applied
• Translate academic insights into everyday language