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Journal of World Literature

Literature, Arts & Science
Comparative Studies & World Literature
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Chinese-western comparative literature and poetics, some under heaven, world literature and the deceptiveness of labels, east-west cross-cultural encounters of the lyric, horace ( bce  65–8) and tao yuanming ( ce  365–427), the early modern period, dream of the red chamber , and world literature, confrontation and withdrawal, the literature of “denitiation”, understanding “world literature” in china today, comparative literature in taiwan in the age of world literature, manipulated translation, politicized canon, reception of the gadfly in china, a re-deliberation of minzu literature and world literature, the literary world in alai’s writing.

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Home › Journal › Top Scopus Indexed Journals in English Literature

Top Scopus Indexed Journals in English Literature

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 15, 2020 • ( 0 )

1. English Historical Review -(OXFORD) (https://academic.oup.com/ehr/pages/About)

2. ASIATIC: IITUM Journal of English Language & Literature ( https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/AJELL )

3. English for Specific Purposes ( https://www.journals.elsevier.com/english-for-specific-purposes )

4. The Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) ( https://www.aate.org.au/journals/english-in-australia )

5. English in Education (Wiley) ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17548845 )

6. English World-Wide | A Journal of Varieties of English ( https://benjamins.com/catalog/eww )

7. European Journal of English Studies– Taylor & Francis Online ( https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current )

8. Journal of English for Academic Purposes – Elsevier B.V. ( https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-english-for-academic-purposes )

9. Journal of English Linguistics- SAGE Journals ( https://journals.sagepub.com/home/eng )

10. Research in the Teaching of English-NCTE ( https://www2.ncte.org/resources/journals/research-in-the-teaching-of-english/ /)

11. The English Classroom – Regional Institute of English ( http://www.riesielt.org/english-classroom-journal )

12. World Englishes (Wiley Blackwell) ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1467971x )

13. English Language & Linguistics – Cambridge Core ( https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics )

14. English Today-The International Review of the English Language-Cambridge Core ( https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today )

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English Literature Research Paper Topics

This guide, centered on English literature research paper topics , serves as a comprehensive resource for students seeking to delve deep into the diverse epochs, authors, and themes that have shaped English literary tradition. Navigating the intricate tapestry of English literature offers scholars a multitude of avenues for exploration. From the mystique of medieval tales to the introspective narratives of modernism, this guide not only provides a plethora of English literature research paper topics but also offers insights on choosing the ideal topic, structuring the research paper, and harnessing the unmatched writing services of iResearchNet. Dive in to unravel the rich heritage of English literature and discover the myriad opportunities it presents for academic exploration.

100 English Literature Research Paper Topics

Diving into English literature is like embarking on a journey through time and culture. From ancient ballads to modernist narratives, it offers a vast panorama of themes, styles, and societal reflections. Below is a comprehensive list of English literature research paper topics spanning across different eras and genres:

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Medieval Literature

The significance of chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight .
The Christian and Pagan elements in Beowulf .
Courtly love in The Knight’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales .
Dream visions in Pearl and Piers Plowman .
The role of fate and providence in The Consolation of Philosophy .
The art of storytelling in The Decameron vs. The Canterbury Tales .
The Seven Deadly Sins in Everyman .
The evolution of the English language: Old English vs. Middle English.
Religious allegory in The Second Shepherd’s Play .
Women and femininity in the Lais of Marie de France .

Renaissance and Elizabethan Age

Shakespeare’s portrayal of power in Macbeth .
Love and beauty in Sonnet 18 .
The idea of the “New World” in The Tempest .
The virtues in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene .
Magic and science in Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.
The pastoral settings of As You Like It .
The politics of gender in Twelfth Night .
Revenge and madness in Hamlet .
John Donne’s metaphysical poetry and its innovation.
The darker side of the Renaissance: The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster.

The Restoration and the 18th Century

The satirical world of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels .
Class struggles in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders .
Alexander Pope’s critique of society in The Rape of the Lock .
Aphra Behn and the emergence of the woman writer.
The wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson’s essays.
The rise of the novel: Richardson vs. Fielding.
Sentimentality and society in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy .
Politics and plays: John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera .
Women, education, and literature: Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas.
The mock-heroic in English literature.

Romantic Period

Nature and transcendence in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey .
The Byronic hero in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage .
Shelley’s Ozymandias and the ephemeral nature of power.
The Gothic romance of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights .
George Gordon Lord Byron and the Romantic antihero.
The visionary world of William Blake’s poems.
The exotic and the familiar in Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Keats’s exploration of beauty and mortality.
The industrial revolution’s reflection in literature.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the dangers of ambition.

Victorian Era

Charles Dickens and his critique of Victorian society.
The challenges of morality in Thomas Hardy’s novels.
The bildungsroman in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre .
The plight of women in George Eliot’s Middlemarch .
Oscar Wilde’s wit and irony in The Importance of Being Earnest .
The debate on science and religion in In Memoriam A.H.H by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
The mystery and suspense of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.
The “Woman Question” in Victorian literature.
The realism of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire.
Gothic elements in Dracula by Bram Stoker.
The fragmented narrative of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse .
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the disillusionment of the post-war era.
The struggles of the working class in D.H. Lawrence’s novels.
The impact of World War I on English poetry.
James Joyce’s revolutionary narrative techniques in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .
E.M. Forster’s exploration of social and racial themes.
The critique of colonialism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .
W.B. Yeats and the Irish literary revival.
The emergence of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
The Jazz Age and decadence in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Gothic Tradition

Origins of Gothic fiction: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto .
The supernatural and macabre in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
Ann Radcliffe’s influence on the Gothic novel.
The role of the Byronic hero in The Vampyre by John Polidori.
Duality of human nature in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .
The haunting atmospheres in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
Gender and sexuality in Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.
Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on English Gothic literature.
Dracula by Bram Stoker: Themes of sexuality and fear of the unknown.
The Gothic novel as a reflection of societal fears and anxieties.

The Angry Young Men Era

Social criticism in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger .
Exploring masculinity in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe.
The disillusionment of post-war Britain in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner .
The class struggle in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim .
Existential themes in John Wain’s Hurry on Down .
Feminine perspectives in the era: Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey .
The critique of academia in The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury.
The Angry Young Men and their influence on modern theater.
The transformation of British literature in the 1950s and 1960s.
The lasting legacy of the Angry Young Men movement in contemporary literature.

Postmodern British Literature

Metafiction in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot .
The playfulness of language in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses .
Intertextuality in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit .
The fragmented narrative in Graham Swift’s Waterland .
Reality and fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement .
Gender and postcolonial themes in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve .
The exploration of identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth .
The deconstruction of traditional narrative in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
Postmodern gothic in The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.
Magical realism in The Porcelain Doll by Julian Barnes.

Contemporary English Literature

The multicultural London in Brick Lane by Monica Ali.
Exploring family dynamics in On Beauty by Zadie Smith.
The concept of time in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam .
The role of history in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall .
The exploration of love and loss in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending .
Postcolonial Britain in Andrea Levy’s Small Island .
The challenges of modern life in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity .
The evolution of the English detective novel: Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories .
The legacy of the British Empire in The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.
The digital age and its influence on literature: The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon.

English literature boasts a rich and varied tapestry of themes, periods, and genres. This comprehensive list is a testament to the dynamism and depth of the field, offering a myriad of research avenues for students. As they venture into each topic, they can appreciate the nuances and complexities that have shaped the literary tradition, making it an invaluable component of global culture and heritage.

English Literature and the Range of Topics It Offers

English literature, encompassing the vast historical, cultural, and artistic legacy of writings in the English language, boasts a rich tapestry of narratives, characters, and stylistic innovations. From the earliest Old English epic poems to the reflective and multifaceted postmodern novels, English literature offers an expansive array of topics for analysis, discussion, and research. The depth and breadth of this literary tradition are mirrored by the diverse range of English literature research paper topics it can inspire.

The Medieval Foundation

Diving into the early origins of English literature, we encounter works like Beowulf , an Old English epic poem of heroism, fate, and the struggle against malevolent forces. Medieval English literature, characterized by religious texts, chivalric romances, and philosophical treatises, sets the stage for the evolution of narrative styles and thematic explorations. The rich allegorical narratives, like Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , present intricate societal and spiritual commentaries that still resonate with readers today. These works invite inquiries into the socio-religious dynamics of medieval England, the evolution of the English language, and the literary techniques employed.

Renaissance and Enlightenment: A Burst of Creativity

The Renaissance and Elizabethan Age saw the emergence of revered playwrights like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, whose dramas, whether tragedies, comedies, or histories, plumbed the depths of human emotion, politics, and existence. The genius of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Othello , juxtaposed against Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus , provides a fertile ground for investigating themes of ambition, betrayal, love, and existential angst. Moreover, with poets like Edmund Spenser and his epic The Faerie Queene , English literature expanded its horizons, both thematically and stylistically.

The subsequent Restoration and the 18th century ushered in a period of social and literary change. With authors like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, satire became a powerful tool to critique society and politics. Furthermore, the emergence of the novel, as exemplified by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela , offered researchers a chance to explore the evolving societal values, gender norms, and narrative techniques.

Romanticism, Victorian Era to Modernism: A Spectrum of Emotion and Thought

The Romantic period, marked by poets like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats, celebrated nature, emotion, and individualism. In contrast, the Victorian era, with novelists like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters, addressed societal change, morality, and industrialization. Both periods are a goldmine for English literature research paper topics around the individual vs. society, the role of nature, and the exploration of the self.

Modernism in English literature, with heavyweights like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, revolutionized narrative structure and thematic depth. Works from this era, such as To the Lighthouse or The Waste Land , demand analysis on fragmented narrative, stream of consciousness, and the introspective exploration of the human psyche.

Contemporary Reflections

Contemporary English literature, shaped by postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern influences, gives voice to a plethora of perspectives. Authors like Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Julian Barnes tackle issues of identity, multiculturalism, history, and reality versus fiction. Such works present a plethora of avenues for research, from analyzing the postcolonial identity in Rushdie’s narratives to the intricate tapestries of familial and societal dynamics in Smith’s novels.

Concluding Thoughts

In essence, English literature is an evolving entity, reflecting and shaping societal, cultural, and individual values and challenges over the centuries. For students and researchers, the wealth of English literature research paper topics it offers ranges from historical and linguistic analyses to deep dives into thematic cores and stylistic innovations. Whether one wishes to explore the chivalric codes of medieval romances, the biting satires of the 18th century, the emotional landscapes of Romanticism, or the fragmented realities of postmodern narratives, English literature provides an inexhaustible reservoir of research opportunities.

How to Choose an English Literature Topic

Choosing a research paper topic, especially within the expansive field of English literature, can be a challenging endeavor. The centuries-spanning literature offers a treasure trove of stories, themes, characters, and socio-political contexts that beckon exhaustive exploration. As such, students often find themselves at a crossroads, wondering where to begin and how to narrow down their choices to find that one compelling topic. Here’s a detailed guide to streamline this process:

Align with Your Interests: Dive into periods, genres, or authors that genuinely intrigue you. If Victorian novels captivate your imagination or if Shakespearean dramas resonate with you, use that as your starting point. Genuine interest ensures sustained motivation throughout your research journey.
Evaluate Academic Relevance: While personal interest is vital, ensure your chosen topic aligns with academic goals and curriculum requirements. Some English literature research paper topics, while intriguing, might not offer substantial academic value for a particular course or level of study.
Seek Familiar Ground (But Not Too Familiar): Leverage your previous readings and coursework. Familiarity offers a foundation, but challenge yourself to explore uncharted territories within that domain. If you enjoyed Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , maybe delve into its feminist interpretations or comparative studies with other contemporaneous works.
Embrace Complexity: Opt for English literature research paper topics that lend themselves to multifaceted exploration. Simple topics might not provide enough depth for comprehensive research papers. Instead of a general overview of Romantic poetry, explore the portrayal of nature in Wordsworth’s works versus Shelley’s.
Historical and Cultural Context: Literature isn’t created in a vacuum. Understand the historical and societal backdrop of a literary work. This context can offer a fresh perspective and can be an excellent lens for your research.
Contemporary Relevance: How does a particular work or literary period converse with today’s world? Exploring the modern implications or relevance of classic works can be both enlightening and academically rewarding.
Diverse Interpretations: Embrace English literature research paper topics open to various interpretations. Works like George Orwell’s 1984 or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot can be analyzed from political, psychological, existential, or linguistic viewpoints.
Consult with Peers and Professors: Engage in discussions with classmates and seek advice from professors. Their feedback can provide new perspectives or refine your existing topic ideas.
Read Critiques and Literary Journals: Academic journals, critiques, and literary analyses offer insights into popular research areas and can help you identify gaps or lesser-explored aspects of a work or period.
Flexibility is Key: As you delve deeper into your research, be open to tweaking or even changing your topic. New findings or challenges might necessitate slight shifts in your research focus.

Choosing the right research topic in English literature requires a blend of personal passion, academic relevance, and the potential for in-depth exploration. By aligning your interests with academic goals, and being open to exploration and adaptation, you pave the way for a fulfilling and academically enriching research experience. Remember, the journey of researching and understanding literature can be as enlightening as the end result. Embrace the process, and let the vast ocean of English literature inspire and challenge you.

How to Write an English Literature Research Paper

Penning an English literature research paper is a task that demands meticulous planning, a deep understanding of the subject, and the ability to weave thoughts coherently. English literature, with its vast and rich tapestry, offers endless avenues for exploration, making it both an exciting and daunting endeavor. Below are step-by-step guidelines to craft a compelling research paper in this domain:

Understanding the Assignment: Before diving into the research phase, ensure you fully understand the assignment’s requirements. Is there a specific format? Are certain sources mandatory? What’s the word count? This foundational clarity sets the stage for efficient research and writing.
Preliminary Research: Start with a broad exploration of your topic. Read general articles, introductory chapters, or review papers. This will give you a general overview and can help narrow down your focus.
Thesis Statement Formulation: Your thesis is the backbone of your research paper. It should be clear, precise, and arguable. For instance, instead of writing “Shakespeare’s plays are influential,” you might specify, “ Macbeth illustrates the dire consequences of unchecked ambition.”
Diving Deeper – Detailed Research: With your thesis in hand, dive deeper into primary (original texts) and secondary sources (critiques, essays). Libraries, academic databases, and literary journals are treasure troves of valuable information.
Organize Your Findings: Use digital tools, index cards, or notebooks to categorize and annotate your findings. Grouping similar ideas together will make the writing process smoother.
Drafting an Outline: An organized structure is essential for clarity. Create an outline with clear headings and subheadings, ensuring a logical flow of ideas. This will serve as a roadmap as you write.
Introduction Crafting: Your introduction should be engaging, offering a glimpse of your thesis and the significance of your study. Remember, first impressions count!
Literary Analysis: Delve into the text’s intricacies – symbols, themes, character development, stylistic devices, and historical context.
Critiques and Counter-arguments: Discuss various interpretations of the text, and don’t shy away from addressing dissenting views. This lends credibility and depth to your paper.
Comparative Analysis (if applicable): Compare the chosen work with others, drawing parallels or highlighting contrasts.
Maintaining Coherence and Transition: Each paragraph should have a clear main idea and transition smoothly to the next, maintaining the paper’s flow and ensuring the reader’s engagement.
Conclusion Crafting: Reiterate your thesis and summarize your main findings. Discuss the broader implications of your study, potentially suggesting areas for further exploration.
Citing Your Sources: Always attribute ideas and quotations to their original authors. Depending on the assigned format (MLA, APA, etc.), ensure that in-text citations and the bibliography are correctly formatted.
Revision and Proofreading: Once your draft is complete, take a break before revisiting it. Read it aloud to catch awkward phrasings. Check for grammatical errors, consistency in argumentation, and clarity in presenting ideas. Consider seeking peer reviews or utilizing editing tools.
Seek Feedback: Before final submission, consider sharing your paper with a mentor, professor, or knowledgeable peer. Their insights can be invaluable in refining your research paper.

Writing an English literature research paper is as much an art as it is a science. While meticulous research and structured writing are crucial, allowing your passion for literature to shine through will elevate your paper. Remember, literature is about exploring the human experience, and as you dissect these masterpieces, you’re not just analyzing texts but delving into profound insights about life, society, and humanity. Embrace the journey, and let every step, from research to writing, be a process of discovery.

iResearchNet Writing Services for Custom English Literature Research Paper

For any student of English literature, the voyage through various eras, authors, and their imaginative universes is both exhilarating and overwhelming. Each period, from the mystical narratives of the Middle Ages to the raw modernism of the 20th century, has its distinctive character, themes, and voices. However, writing a research paper on such vast and diverseEnglish literature research paper topics can be challenging. This is where iResearchNet steps in, bridging the gap between intricate literary exploration and top-notch academic writing.

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At iResearchNet, our primary goal is to support and elevate your academic journey in English literature. With a blend of profound literary knowledge and impeccable writing skills, we bring to life the narratives, themes, and voices of the past and present. So, whether you’re venturing into the allegorical world of The Faerie Queene or analyzing the post-colonial undertones in Wide Sargasso Sea , with iResearchNet, you’re not just getting a paper; you’re obtaining a piece of scholarly art.

Delve into the Literary Chronicles with iResearchNet

English literature, a tapestry woven with tales of heroism, love, tragedy, and introspection, spans over centuries, capturing the essence of an evolving nation and its people. From the ethereal romance of the Arthurian legends to the stark realism of the 20th century, the literary works of England are a testament to the country’s rich cultural and historical legacy.

But as profound and diverse as English literature is, the challenge lies in understanding its nuances, interpreting its layers, and articulating insights in a coherent and captivating manner. That’s where the journey often becomes daunting for many students. But what if this journey could become less overwhelming and more enlightening?

Enter iResearchNet—a beacon for those navigating the intricate alleys of English literary exploration.

Why trudge through the dense forests of Shakespearean plays, Brontëan landscapes, or Eliotean modernism alone when you can have an expert guiding you every step of the way? With iResearchNet, you don’t just get a service; you get a scholarly companion. Our dedicated team of experts, well-versed in the vast expanse of English literature, are eager to assist you in crafting research papers that resonate with depth, originality, and scholarly rigor.

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100 Best Literature Research Paper Topics For Students

Literary research paper topics are among the most interesting to write about. Books are the best teachers for most learners. And, students love reading interesting literature books. But, when asked to write research papers, most students have difficulties choosing their topics. That’s because many issues can be investigated and written about.

For instance, literary topics can be about characters’ personalities in certain works. They can also be about particular characteristics of specific literary genres. Learners can also choose literary analysis topics that focus on the life story of famous writers or poets. But, regardless of what a learner opts to write about, they should choose interesting topics.

What are Interesting Literary Research Paper Topics?

Several factors make a topic interesting to write about. A topic for a research paper or a graduate thesis should generally be definite, specific, and innovative. Also, it should be interesting to research and write about. Here’s how to select interesting literature topics:

Think about something. Explore the idea to select a topic for which you can find sufficient research data from credible sources. Narrow down your subject if you find it too broad.

English literature topics can be classified into different categories. Here some of these categories and topics can be considered in each category.

Great World Literature Research Topics

Perhaps, you’ve been asked to write a literature research paper with a global perspective. Here are some of the literary analysis research paper topics that you can consider.

Explain how the supernatural and spirituality help in furthering the development of the plot in the Latin American literature of the early 20th century.
What themes are common in the Japanese poems of the early 20th century? How do they differ from those of the early 19th century?
Compare the early Chinese literary works and European literary works of the middle ages. How different or alike are they?
How were European literary works in the early 20th century shaped by the revolutionary works of Engels and Marx? What examples can demonstrate this influence?
Explain how the Muslim philosophers’ work of the 15th century led to new ideas and inventions across the globe.
Compare and contrast different anti-British works that originated in India in the 19th century with pro-colonialist works that came from England at the same time.
How did the nightmarish utopian future ideas of Aldous Huxley influence modern-day science fiction writers across the world?
Explain how the Antigone play by Sophocles deals with the conflict between the central characters while relating to the state laws and individual conscience.
How are the sentiments of the authors reflected in Animal Farm by George Orwell and concerns about the October Revolution?
Explain some of the examples of literary fiction pieces that have shaped cultures in the world. Have historic, societal, and cultural factors played some roles in shaping these literature pieces?
Being a prolific writer in the early and mid-19th century, Charles Dickens’s works were published in serialized forms. How and why has this approach become less fashionable?
Compare and contrast the early Japanese literature works and the early Chinese literature works. How do they differ in terms of values and culture?
Explain how comedy differs in literature across cultures. What comedy appeared in the early theatrical performances and it’s still present in modern literature?
Analyze chivalry and honor critically in the Green Knight and Sir Gawain. What are the qualities of these works from a similar period?
Compare and contrast the Odyssey and Iliad by Homer the Ancient Greek. Explain how cultures across the world have adapted the themes presented in the poem.

British Literature Research Paper Topics

Students have many topics to choose from when it comes to British literature essay topics. Here are some of the best literature topics from the works of British authors.

Discuss Victorian England’s picture with the works of Charles Dickens in mind
Discuss the theme of Orphans with the Oliver Twist character in mind
Explain how British Literature has influenced different cultures
Explain how British literature has addressed gender issues
Explain how King Lear highlights the differences between anti-heroes and villains
Explain William Shakespeare’s personality- Highlight facts and myths
Choose two famous British novels and then compare the characters in them
Explain the viewpoint of different writers about the Utopian civilization idea
With Harry Potter books in mind, explain why some literature books are considered classics
Explain how love and romantic love are presented in Charlotte Bronte’s works
Explain how modern literary works have been affected by the Victorian period works
Discuss the adultery theme in Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Who are the main characters in Lake Poets’ works?
Explain how violent imagery was used in World War I poetry
Explain talent as a theme in Milton’s on His Blindness
Explain innocence loss in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
Explain the theme of individualism versus collectivism in Oliver Twist
Explain why the popularity of detective novels increased in the XIX century
What role did the supernatural play in Macbeth: a case study of three witches
Class demarcation in XVII century- The vengeance theme

American Literature Topics

Some teachers ask students to choose American literature research topics for certain reasons. If asked to write on such topics, here are some of the American literature research paper topics to consider.

Analyze key aspects of American ideology, particularly in the literature written before the 20th century.
Determine thematic concerns and literary styles of the major historical period of American literature between the colonial period and post-modernism.
Show the American identity uniqueness of texts
Propose connections between the American literature concerns and themes in the larger historical development and social issues that face the present world
Examine major concerns and themes that reappear across the American literature
Highlight the major themes in Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Explain the African American Experience with female authors like Alice Walker, Zora Neal Hurston, and Toni Morrison
Explain the predominant theme in The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Explain how Jonathan Edwards epitomizes Puritan definitions in his sermons
Explain the use of historical personalities and events by Washington Irving as the background for his works
The Crucible demonstrates how a community can be torn apart by hysteria. Explain
Explain how Sylvia Plath demonstrates the social pressure faced by women in the 1960s in the Bell Jar.
Explain how John Knowles demonstrates the impact of war on everyone
Explain the strong belief in the education power by Maya Angelou as depicted in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Explain how Thornton Wilder conveys life as a gift in Our Town
Discuss the themes of anger and pity in the Grapes of Wrath
Explain how Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck portrays the Great Depression struggles
Discuss the portrayal of the unconquerable spirit in Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.
Plays by Eugene O’Neil are tragically realistic. Explain
God is humanized in The Creation poem by James Weldon Johnson. Explain

Some of the ideas here are great poetry topics. Nevertheless, they require careful research and analysis to write about.

High School Literary Essay Topics

Some topics in literature are ideal for high school essays. Here are examples of literary analysis paper topics for high school students.

Compare and contrast the major characters in your preferred book
Choose your favorite character in a book and explain your reasons for liking it
Please explain why the quality of a literature book is not determined by its length
Highlight the similarities of your favorite books
Discuss the top 4 authors in horror books
Explain why reading some books is more difficult than reading others
Explain what it takes to write a high-quality poem
Who is your favorite poet and why?
Explain what makes your favorite book interesting
Who is your favorite character in literary works and why?
What makes some literature books difficult to read?
Who are your favorite top 5 authors and why?
Should the age of readers be restricted to some books?
What is your favorite literary genre?
Explain why the author determines the quality of a book more than the story
Discuss the literary works of your favorite authors
Why is it important to captivate readers with the introductory chapter of a book?
Which book genre makes great movies?
Why is the work of Harry Potter so popular?
Explain why your favorite horror book is scary

Unique Research Topics in English Literature

Some literature research topics are unique and can be written about by learners at different study levels. Here are examples of such topics.

Analyze the use of literary devices in novels
Discuss the author’s autobiography
Analyze literary genres and the role played by an artist in them
Compare the works of a similar genre
Highlight the gender roles of characters in literary works
Social stratification and Harry Potter- Discuss
With Charles Dickens’ work in mind, explain the peculiarity of the bildungsroman genre.
Explain how The Lord of the Rings uses artificial language
Explain how the Sherlock Holmes image influences the world of detective fiction
Explain the war theme in the world literature

These are also great literary journalism topics. Nevertheless, they require extensive research to write about.

In a nutshell, students have many literary argument topics to consider. The most important thing is to choose an interesting topic that you can find sufficient data to write about. Also, don’t hesitate to check our history topics .

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How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

Search for relevant literature
Evaluate sources
Identify themes, debates, and gaps
Outline the structure
Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

Quick Run-through
Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

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See an example

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

Your university’s library catalogue
Google Scholar
Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
EconLit (economics)
Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

What question or problem is the author addressing?
What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
What are the key theories, models, and methods?
Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
What are the results and conclusions of the study?
How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

Most research has focused on young women.
There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

Open Google Slides Download PowerPoint

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Sampling methods
Simple random sampling
Stratified sampling
Cluster sampling
Likert scales
Reproducibility

Statistics

Null hypothesis
Statistical power
Probability distribution
Effect size
Poisson distribution

Research bias

Optimism bias
Cognitive bias
Implicit bias
Hawthorne effect
Anchoring bias
Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An annotated bibliography is a list of source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a paper .

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28 August 2024

Exclusive: the papers that most heavily cite retracted studies

Richard Van Noorden &
Miryam Naddaf

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Computer rendered illustration of a lone figure watching as a towering house of blank white cards collapses.

Credit: Waldemar Thaut/Zoonar via Alamy

In January, a review paper 1 about ways to detect human illnesses by examining the eye appeared in a conference proceedings published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. But neither its authors nor its editors noticed that 60% of the papers it cited had already been retracted.

The case is one of the most extreme spotted by a giant project to find papers whose results might be in question because they cite retracted or problematic research. The project’s creator, computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, shared his data with Nature ’s news team, which analysed it to find the papers that most heavily cite retracted work yet haven’t themselves been withdrawn (see ‘Retracted references’).

Chain retraction: how to stop bad science propagating through the literature

“We are not accusing anybody of doing something wrong. We are just observing that in some bibliographies, the references have been retracted or withdrawn, meaning that the paper may be unreliable,” Cabanac says. He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, referring to an analogy, originally from the Bible, about statues or edifices that collapse because of their weak clay foundations.

The IEEE paper is the second-highest on the list assembled by Nature , with 18 of the 30 studies it cites withdrawn. Its authors didn’t respond to requests for comment, but IEEE integrity director Luigi Longobardi says that the publisher didn’t know about the issue until Nature asked, and that it is investigating.

Cabanac, a research-integrity sleuth, has already created software to flag thousands of problematic papers in the literature for issues such as computer-written text or disguised plagiarism . He hopes that his latest detector, which he has been developing over the past two years and describes this week in a Comment article in Nature , will provide another way to stop bad research propagating through the scientific literature — some of it fake work created by ‘papermill’ firms .

Further scrutiny

Cabanac lists the detector’s findings on his website , but elsewhere online — on the paper-review site PubPeer and on social media — he has explicitly flagged more than 1,700 papers that caught his eye because of their reliance on retracted work. Some authors have thanked Cabanac for alerting them to problems in their references. Others argue that it’s unfair to effectively cast aspersions on their work because of retractions made after publication that, they say, don’t affect their paper.

Scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers

Retracted references don’t definitively show that a paper is problematic, notes Tamara Welschot, part of the research-integrity team at Springer Nature in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, but they are a useful sign that a paper might benefit from further scrutiny. ( Nature ’s news team is independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)

Some researchers argue that retraction of references in a narrative review — which describes the state of research in a field — doesn’t necessarily invalidate the original paper. But when studies assessed by a systematic review or meta-analysis are withdrawn, the results of that review should always be recalculated to keep the literature up to date, says epidemiologist Isabelle Boutron at Paris City University.

Retracted references

These studies have the highest proportion of retracted papers in their reference lists, according to Nature ’s analysis of articles flagged by the Feet of Clay Detector.

Year	Title of paper	Number of retracted studies in reference list
2012		33 of 51 (65%)
2023		18 of 30 (60%)
2024		46 of 77 (60%)
2012		25 of 53 (47%)
2001		25 of 53 (47%)
2016		15 of 33 (45%)
2012		40 of 125 (32%)
2013		18 of 57 (32%)
2012		47 of 225 (21%)
2023		12 of 58 (21%)

Source: Nature analysis of data from the Feet of Clay Detector . Figures for references and retractions were hand-checked and altered where necessary; detector data sources do not always give accurate counts.

Picking up fraudsters

Some of the papers that cite high proportions of retracted work are authored by known academic fraudsters who have had many of their own papers retracted.

These include engineering researcher Ali Nazari, who was dismissed from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, in 2019, after a university misconduct investigation into his activities. He previously worked at Islamic Azad University in Saveh, Iran, and his current whereabouts are unclear. After Nature told publishers about his extant papers 2 , 3 topping Cabanac’s lists — including Elsevier and Fap-Unifesp, a non-profit foundation that supports the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil — they said that they would look into the articles. One of the relevant journals was discontinued in 2013, Elsevier noted.

Cabanac’s detector also flags papers 4 by Chen-Yuan Chen, a computer scientist who worked at the National Pingtung University of Education in Taiwan until 2014. He was behind a syndicate that faked peer review and boosted citations, which came to light in 2014 after an investigation by the publisher SAGE. Some of Chen’s papers that are still in the literature were published by Springer Nature, which says it hadn’t been aware of the issue but is now investigating. Neither Chen nor Nazari responded to Nature ’s requests for comment.

Another flagged study 5 is by Ahmad Salar Elahi, a physicist affiliated with the Islamic Azad University in Tehran who has already had dozens of his papers retracted, in many cases because of excessive self-citation and instances of faked peer review. In 2018, the website Retraction Watch (which also wrote about the Nazari and Chen cases) reported that according to Mahmoud Ghoranneviss, then-director of the Plasma Physics Research Centre where Elahi worked, Elahi was likely to be dismissed from the university. Now, Ghoranneviss — who has retired — says that Elahi was barred only from that centre and not the rest of the university. Elahi continues to publish papers, sometimes listing co-authors including Ghoranneviss, who says he wasn’t aware of this. Neither Elahi nor the university responded to Nature ’s queries. The IEEE and Springer Nature, publishers of the journals that ran the Elahi papers, say they’re investigating.

Unhappy authors

Some authors are unhappy about Cabanac’s work. In May 2024, editors of the journal Clinical and Translational Oncology placed an expression of concern on a 2019 review paper 6 about RNA and childhood cancers, warning that it might not be reliable because it cited “a number of articles that have been retracted”. The journal’s publishing editor, Ying Jia at Springer Nature in Washington DC, says the team was alerted by one of Cabanac’s posts on social media last year.

Guillaume Cabanac poses for a portrait on the Paul Sabatier University campus.

Computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac has flagged more than 1,700 papers that caught his eye because of their reliance on retracted work. Credit: Fred Scheiber/SIPA/Shutterstock

Cabanac’s analysis finds that just under 10% of the article’s 637 references have been retracted — almost all after the review was published. However, the paper’s corresponding author, María Sol Brassesco, a biologist at the University of São Paulo, says that removing these references doesn’t change the conclusions of the review, and that she has sent the journal an updated version, which it hasn’t published. Because the cited works were retracted after publication, the expression of concern “felt like we were being punished for something that we could not see ahead”, she says. Jia says that editors felt that adding the notice was the most appropriate action.

In other cases, authors disagree about what to do. Nature examined three papers 7 , 8 , 9 in which between 5 and 16% of the references have now been retracted, all co-authored by Mohammad Taheri, a genetics PhD student at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany. He says that criticisms of his work on PubPeer “lack solid scientific basis”. Yet, in May, a co-author of two of those works, Marcel Dinger, dean of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, told Retraction Watch that he was reassessing review papers that cited retracted articles. He now says that his team has submitted corrections for the works, but Frontiers, which published one paper, says it hasn’t received the correspondence and will investigate. Elsevier — which published the other two papers — also says that it is examining the issue.

Catching problems early

Examples in which papers cite already-retracted work suggest that publishers could do a better job of screening manuscripts. For instance, 20 studies cited by a 2023 review paper 10 about RNA and gynaecological cancers in Frontiers in Oncology had been retracted before the article was submitted. Review co-author Maryam Mahjoubin-Tehran, a pharmacist at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences in Iran, told Nature that her team didn’t know about the retractions, and does not plan to update or withdraw the paper. The publisher, Frontiers, says it is investigating.

Until recently, publishers have not flagged citations to retracted papers in submitted manuscripts. However, many publishers say they are aware of Cabanac’s tool and monitor issues he raises, and some are bringing in similar screening tools.

Last year, Wiley announced it was checking Retraction Watch’s database of retracted articles to flag issues in reference lists, and Elsevier says it is also rolling out a tool that assesses manuscripts for red flags such as self-citations and references to retracted work. Springer Nature is piloting an in-house tool to look for retracted papers in manuscript citations and Longobardi says the IEEE is considering including Feet of Clay or similar solutions in its workflow. A working group for the STM Integrity Hub — a collaboration between publishers — has also tested the Feet of Clay Detector and “found it useful”, says Welschot.

Medical trend

Medical reviews that cite studies in areas later shown to be affected by fraud are a recurring theme in Cabanac’s findings.

In theory, meta-analyses or systematic reviews should be withdrawn or corrected if work they have cited goes on to be retracted, according to a policy issued in 2021 by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group known for its gold-standard reviews of medical treatments .

Boutron, who directs Cochrane France in Paris, is using Cabanac’s tool to identify systematic reviews that cite retracted work, and to assess the impact the retracted studies had on the overall results.

However, a 2022 study 11 suggests that authors are often reluctant to update reviews, even when they are told the papers cite retracted work. Researchers e-mailed the authors of 88 systematic reviews that cited now-retracted studies in bone health by a Japanese fraudster, Yoshihiro Sato . Only 11 of the reviews were updated, the authors told Nature last year.

Retraction alerts

Authors aren’t routinely alerted if work cited in their past papers is withdrawn — although in recent years, paper-management tools for researchers such as Zotero and EndNote have incorporated Retraction Watch’s open database of retracted papers and have begun to flag papers that have been taken down. Cabanac thinks publishers might use tools like his to create similar alerts.

In 2016, researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, began developing a tool called RetractoBot , which automatically notifies authors by e-mail when a study that they have previously cited has been retracted. The software currently monitors 20,000 retracted papers and about 400,000 papers, published after 2000, that cite them. The team behind it is running a randomized trial to see whether papers flagged by RetractoBot are subsequently cited less than those not flagged by the tool, and will publish its results next year, says project lead Nicholas DeVito, a integrity researcher at Oxford.

The team has alerted more than 100,000 researchers so far. DeVito says that a minority of authors are annoyed about being contacted, but that others are grateful. “We are merely trying to provide a service to the community to reduce this practice from happening,” he says.

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Published: 28 August 2024

Global trends and hotspots in the study of the effects of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke

Qian Liu 1 , 2 ,
Shijie Yang 3 &
HeCheng Chen 1 , 2

Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition volume 43 , Article number: 133 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

The objective of this study was to visually analyse global research trends and hotspots regarding the role of PM2.5 in ischemic stroke.

The Web of Science core collection database was used to search the literature on PM2.5 and ischemic stroke from 2006 to 2024. Visualization analysis was conducted using CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and an online bibliometric platform.

The analysis comprises 190 articles published between 2006 and 2024 by 1229 authors from 435 institutions in 39 countries, across 78 journals. Wellenius GA has the highest number of published and cited papers. China has the highest number of papers, while Canada has the highest citation frequency. Capital Medical University published the highest number of papers, and Harvard University had the highest citation frequency for a single paper. The study investigated the impact of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke in three phases. The first phase analysed hospitalisation rates for correlations. The second phase utilised large-scale multi-cohort data from around the world. The third phase involved studying global exposure risk through machine learning and model construction. Currently, there is limited research on the mechanisms involved, and further in-depth investigation is required.

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the research framework and hotspots concerning the effect of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke. The analysis aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of this field for researchers. It is expected that research on the effect of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke will remain an important research topic in the future.

Introduction

Ischemic stroke is the leading cause of death and disability worldwide, posing a great threat to human health [ 1 ]. Air pollution is an individual risk factor for ischemic stroke independent of smoking, poor diet, and physical inactivity in the United States. Air pollution accounts for more than a quarter of the stroke burden. [ 2 ]. Airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5, aerodynamic diameter < 2.5 μm) is the main component of air pollution. At present, a large number of studies have shown that air pollution are highly associated with an increased risk of ischemic stroke, especially PM2.5 [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. Gu et al. found that for every 10 µg/ m 3 increase in the PM2.5 level in China, hospitalizations for acute cerebrovascular disease and Transient Ischemic Attacks increased by 0.20% and 0.33%, respectively [ 6 ]. Therefore, reducing air pollution and improving air quality are of great significance for reducing the incidence of ischemic stroke.

Bibliometric analysis is a widely used method for evaluating the quality and impact of academic research in various fields [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]. It presents the knowledge structure and research status of a field more intuitively through quantitative analysis of published literature, making it a faster and more accurate way to study trends and hotspots compared to systematic and wide-ranging reviews and other types of literature research. [ 11 , 12 , 13 ].

Research on the impact of global air pollution on human health has led to a gradual deepening of our understanding of the effect of air pollution on stroke. Specifically, research on the impact of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke has been ongoing for decades, resulting in significant developments and high-quality research results. To date, no bibliometric study has been conducted on the impact of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke to explore the distribution characteristics and trends in this research field. Therefore, this study aims to bibliometrically the relevant literature on the effect of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke, explore the current hotspots and possible future trends in this research field, identify potential research gaps, and provide an important reference for researchers and institutions in this field.

Materials and methods

Data sources and search strategy.

The Web of Science (WOS) is an extensive, multidisciplinary database encompassing all high-impact scientific journals and distinguished indexes [ 14 , 15 , 16 ]. In comparison with Scopus or MEDLINE/PubMed, the literature measurement analysis facilitated by the WOS database can retrieve more comprehensive information [ 17 ]. A literature search using the Web Science Core (WoSCC) database on February 18, 2024. The articles were retrieved from January 1, 2000, to February 18, 2024.The search strategy employed was as follows:

(((((((((((((((((((((((TS=(Ischemic Strokes)) OR TS=(Stroke, Ischemic)) OR TS=(Ischaemic Stroke)) OR TS=(Ischaemic Strokes)) OR TS=(Stroke, Ischaemic)) OR TS=(Cryptogenic Ischemic Stroke)) OR TS=(Cryptogenic Ischemic Strokes)) OR TS=(Ischemic Stroke, Cryptogenic)) OR TS=(Stroke, Cryptogenic Ischemic)) OR TS=(Cryptogenic Stroke)) OR TS=(Cryptogenic Strokes)) OR TS=(Stroke, Cryptogenic)) OR TS=(Cryptogenic Embolism Stroke)) OR TS=(Cryptogenic Embolism Strokes))OR TS=(Embolism Stroke, Cryptogenic)) OR TS=(Stroke, Cryptogenic Embolism)) OR TS=(Wake-up Stroke)) OR TS=(Stroke, Wake-up)) OR TS=(Wake up Stroke)) OR TS=(Wake-up Strokes)) OR TS=(Acute Ischemic Stroke)) OR TS=(Acute Ischemic Strokes)) OR TS=(Ischemic Stroke, Acute)) OR TS=(Stroke, Acute Ischemic)

Step 1 AND Step 2, NOT TI = (“guideline” or “recommendation” or “consensus” or “case report” or “meta” or “review”), AND Language = English. A total of 308 relevant articles were searched.

After conducting an initial data search, two authors screened all manuscripts. Any discrepancies identified by the authors were then independently screened by a third author to ensure their relevance to the topic of this study. A total of 190 documents were retrieved and exported as ‘full records and citation references’ and ‘tabs separate files’ for further analysis.

Data analysis

The bibliometrics used in this study mainly include evaluation techniques and relational techniques [ 18 ]. Evaluation techniques are employed to assess the productivity and impact of scientific papers. These include the number of publications, which is used to assess productivity [ 19 ]; the number of citations, which is used to measure the impact of publications [ 20 ]; the h-index [ 21 ], which is used to measure the number of citations to “h” papers; the g-index, which is used to identify the largest number such that the top g articles receive at least g2 citations [ 22 ]; and the m-index, which takes into account the number of years since the article was published [ 23 ]. These techniques have been employed in the analysis of the PM2.5 effect on ischemic stroke, which has been conducted in collaboration with the most prolific authors and journals in this field. Concurrently, relational techniques are employed to investigate the co-occurrence of keywords and the co-citation of journals, with the generation of a visual graph. The term “co-citation” is used to describe the practice of multiple articles being cited jointly. The outcome of a keyword co-occurrence analysis is a network of topics and their interconnections. The content of a document is examined through the lens of a specific word, which can shed light on the relationship between concepts within a given field [ 24 ]. The higher the frequency of words, the stronger the conceptual connections [ 25 ].

The data in “tabs separate files” were imported into the bibliometric online analysis platform ( http://bibliometric.com ) to analyze the relationship between the collaborating countries/regions. CiteSpace [ 26 ] and VOSviewer [ 27 ], the two most commonly used visual tools analysis software in bibliometrics are mainly used to observe research hotspots and trends in a certain field and visualize them in graphical form [ 27 , 28 ]. We applied CiteSpace (version 6.2.R4) and VOSviewer (version 1.6.20) software to visualize bibliometric data. Imported in “full record and citation reference” format and collaborated on the filtered literature between countries/regions, co-authored and co-citation, co-occurrence, clustering and burst analysis. The PRISMA flowchart illustrates the methodology employed in this study, delineating the procedures undertaken for data acquisition, cleaning, and inclusion (Fig. 1 ) [ 23 , 29 ].

PRISMA flowchart

Following a rigorous process of literature cleaning, inclusion, and exclusion, a total of 308 literature sources were downloaded. These sources were then filtered to exclude early access literature, correction literature, editorial materials, conference abstracts, and conference proceedings. The final number of literature sources included for analysis was 190. The literature spanned the period from 2006 to 2024 and included 78 journals, 1229 authors, 435 institutions, and 39 countries. There were 5775 references cited.

Publication review

Publication numbers.

The top 5 by number of publications by author, country, institution and journal, as well as by citations, are summarised in Table 1 . The top author by the number of publications and citations was Wellenius GA, with 8 publications and an average annual citation number of 88.875; this author focuses on the effect of duration of PM2.5 exposure on ischemic stroke and the relationship between air pollution exposure and ischemic stroke risk in women. The country with the most published studies was China with 106 publications and an average annual citation number of 37.831. Articles from the United States had the highest total number of citations and articles from Canada had the highest average number of citations at 106.077. Capital Medical University published the most articles, with a total of 16 articles, and the average citation of each article was 14.062. Harvard University had the highest average citations per article, which was 282.714. The Table 2 shows that the United States Department of Health and Human Services sponsored the highest number of articles in terms of funding sources. SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT published the most articles, but the average single citation of ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION was the highest, which was 54.818.

Number of publications varies by year

By analyzing the number of papers published in a particular research field over the years and the countries in which they were published, we can determine the past development history of this field and the global attention to this field, and also predict the development prospects of this field.

The earliest study of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke was published by Paul J Villeneuve et al. in 2006 [ 30 ], and the number of publications has not increased significantly since then. A clear cut-off point was observed in 2014, and the number of published papers increased significantly thereafter (Fig. 2 ). The participation of countries and regions was an important factor affecting the number of papers published, and much of the contribution during this period was high-quality case-crossover analysis. In 2014, scholars in Taiwan published the first study on the effect of regional PM2.5 levels on ischemic stroke. Since then, the number of regional cooperation and broader studies has increased significantly. Subsequently, the length of PM2.5 exposure period, source methods, and different production scenarios were studied from multiple perspectives. The number of publications peaked in 2022. Therefore, the increase of multi-regional, multi-angle, multi-level research ideas and cooperation and exchange has greatly promoted the development of this research field.

Number of national publications per year

Inter-state cooperation

The United States had a large contribution to PM2.5 research. Four of the top five funding agencies were from the United States. Although the number of articles published in the United States was not the largest, the single cited number was the highest. Since 2013, China’s contribution to this field has become increasingly prominent, with the largest number of articles published in this field, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China has also funded the largest number of research projects in this field (Table 2 ). As a country with a large population and deeply affected by PM2.5, China has an extremely high prevalence of ischemic stroke. It has invested huge in this field and made outstanding contributions. It is believed that China will make greater contributions in this field in the future. China and the United States also have the most cooperation and exchanges in this field (Figure 3 ). The latest research results published by Wellenius GA in 2024 are cooperated with Chinese scholars [ 31 ], and there are many more such cooperation and exchanges.

Cooperation between countries

Distribution of citations between journals

The Dual-Map Overlay shows the distribution of citation relationships between journals (Fig. 4 ). The citing literature is on the left side of the graph, and the cited literature is on the right side of the graph. The colored path between the two represents the citation relationship. Two main citation pathways were found, indicating that studies published in veterinary, animal and natural sciences were mainly cited by studies published in environmental sciences, toxicology and nutrition. Studies published in neurology, kinesiology, and ophthalmology journals are primarily cited by studies published in health, nursing, and medical journals.

Dual-Map Overlay

Co-citation analysis

Author co-citation network analysis.

Lotka’s law was used to determine the minimum number of co-citations. [ 37 ]. Fifty-seven authors met the criteria, with Pope Ca, Wellenius GA, and Tian YH being the top three co-cited authors. The authors were divided into three clusters (Fig. 5 ).

Co-citation author analysis Red : cluster1; Green : cluster2; Blue : cluster3

Professor Pope Ca from Brigham Young University has conducted comprehensive research on the multifaceted, multi-regional, and multi-level impact of PM2.5 on disease. His team has made a substantial contribution to the assessment of the global burden of disease caused by fine particulate matter. Wellenius, a professor at Boston University, has been engaged in research in the field of environmental and health sciences for an extended period. His contributions to the field include a significant impact on the understanding of the influence of PM2.5 on cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. His research has been based on a thorough examination of the local area of PM2.5, the duration of exposure, and the factors influencing the PM2.5 exposure. Professor Tian YH of Beijing University has conducted extensive research on the impact of PM2.5 in China. His studies have covered a vast area, encompassing up to 184 cities, and have focused on the effects of PM2.5 on ischemic cerebral apoplexy. The findings have been used to inform national policy.

Journals co-citation network analysis

If at least one article from both journals is cited in the cited article, two journals are considered to be cited simultaneously [ 38 ]. Seventy journals met the criteria, with ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES , STROKE , and ENVIRONMENT INTERNATIONAL being the top three cited journals (Fig. 6 ). The total number of citations for ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES was high, and the average number of citations per article was as high as 211.14.

Co-citation Jour analysis Red : cluster1; Green : cluster2; Blue : cluster3

Literature co-citation network analysis

Literature were cited analysis is a widely used to study the knowledge in certain areas framework method [ 39 ]. Figure 7 shows the literature co-citation network in the field of PM2.5 effect on ischemic stroke. In the figure, a node represents a document/article, while the connecting line between the two nodes represents the co-cited association between the two articles. The larger the node, the more citations an article has. The smaller the distance between two nodes, the higher the citation frequency of the literature.

Co-citation reference analysis Red : cluster1; Green : cluster2; Blue : cluster3

There were 24 literatures that met the criteria (Fig. 7 ), and the top 3 cited references were Brook Robert D et al. 2010, Wellenius GA et al. 2012, and Wellenius GA et al. 2005. Brook Robert D et al. conducted a review of the effects of particulate air pollution on cardiovascular disease and concluded that the longer the exposure to PM2.5, the greater the risk of cardiovascular mortality and that lower levels of PM2.5 were associated with lower cardiovascular mortality [ 40 ]. Wellenius GA et al. found that exposure to PM2.5, a level considered generally safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s, increased the risk of ischemic stroke within hours of exposure. This means that lower levels of PM2.5 are not safe [ 41 ]. Wellenius GA et al. in 2005 found that PM2.5 levels increased the risk of ischemic but not hemorrhagic stroke [ 42 ]. The above three articles reached the same conclusion from different perspectives: exposure to PM2.5 may increase the risk of ischemic stroke. This provides a solid basis for further research.

Co-occurrence network and analysis of keywords

According to Lotka’s law, 88 keywords were included in the co-occurrence network analysis (Fig. 8 ). The co-occurrence network was divided into 6 clusters. A total of 10 bursts were identified, with the highest intensity being ‘hospital admissions’ (strength, 4.27), followed by ‘global burden’ (strength, 4.14). The last burst was “PM2.5” (strength, 3.89; Fig. 9 ). In order to better analyse the annual research hotspots and the overall trend of change in the research area, citespace was used to perform a timezone analysis of the keywords (Fig. 10 ). The whole graph was divided into several vertical blocks from 2006 to 2024, with an interval of one year. Each block had several nodes, and each node represented a keyword. The nodes are composed of one or more colours, and each colour represents a year. The colour in the outer circle of the node represents the closest to the present, and the width of the colour represents the popularity of the year. If the node is all red, it represents the central hot word. The connection between the nodes represents the connection between two keywords. As you can see from the figure, the study of PM2.5 and ischemic stroke only started in 2006, less than 20 years ago. From 2006 to 2008, a large number of studies on air pollution, ischemic stroke, cardiovascular disease, hospital admissions and exposure were carried out in this area and continue to this day. In 2022, PM2.5 became a central buzzword in the field. From 2011 to 2014, this field focused on the global health burden of PM2.5, using a large number of case-crossover analysis methods, and a large number of Chinese scholars began to pay attention to this field. From 2016 to 2018, this field began to focus on national and regional research, and there were a large number of studies on the effect of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke in China. At the same time, since 2016, this area has received more and more attention, reaching a peak in 2023. From 2018, more in-depth research will be conducted on PM2.5 as a risk factor, and attention to this area will become more popular. By 28 February 2024, the number of research articles in 2024 will have reached the level of the whole year 2014. Research on the effect of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke is expected to show an increasing trend in the future.

Co-Occurrence of key words Red : cluster1; Green : cluster2; Blue : cluster3; Yellow : cluster4; Purple: cluster5; Light blue: cluster6

Key words with the strongest citation bursts

Timezone of key words

Bibliometrics can help people understand the research focus, framework and trend of a certain field intuitively and comprehensively. PM2.5 has been widely studied as a risk factor for ischemic stroke, and reducing the level of PM2.5 can effectively reduce the occurrence of ischemic stroke. A summary of previous studies in this field has occasionally been reported, but there has been no bibliometric description of the literature in this field.

A bibliometric analysis of the study found that the most published author was Wellenius GA, who is affiliated with the Department of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. The most cited article is a study by Burnett, Richard T et al., on risk estimation models for PM2.5 exposure. The research integrates the relative risk (RR) information of PM2.5 from different global scenarios and sources of different combustion types to construct and fit a sustainable and updated comprehensive exposure-response model, which can provide important reference for the regulation of PM2.5 32 . Air pollution from PM2.5 is a global problem that has caused a global health burden. In the early stage, almost all the studies on PM2.5 came from developed countries such as Europe and the United States. However, the worst affected areas of PM2.5 pollution are mainly in developing countries. However, the research in this field from developing countries starts very late, and there is a lack of primary epidemiological investigation. From Fig. 2 , we can find that the first study on China was reported in 2013, which was a study published by scholars in Taiwan on the relationship between PM2.5 level and hospitalization rate of ischemic stroke in Taipei City, Taiwan Province [ 43 ]. The initial study in this field was published in mainland China in 2014, although it was a Meta analysis [ 44 ]. This indicated that mainland China was also beginning to focus on the field. In India, another large developing country, the first study on PM2.5 within the country was not published until 2016 [ 45 ]. Furthermore, Burnett et al. not only included global PM2.5 data from various areas but also considered different sources of PM2.5 production, such as smoking, second-hand smoke, and household fuels. These sources are prevalent in daily life, which enhances the generalisation and wide application of the study’s conclusions. This also better illustrates the global PM2.5 exposure risk worldwide. At that time, the study by Burnett, Richard T et al. made a significant contribution to the global PM2.5 exposure problem and was undoubtedly a major achievement. A global integrated exposure-response risk assessment has been applied similarly, providing a crucial reference for policymakers in the field of global climate policy [ 46 , 47 , 48 ].

Co-citation analysis offers valuable insights into the structural characteristics of a research area. The authors were divided into three clusters based on their citations. Cluster 1 authors focused on studying the impact of PM2.5 levels on the risk of ischemic stroke in various regions of the world. Cluster 2 authors conducted a study on the relationship between PM2.5 levels and ischemic stroke risk in various regions of China. These researches included multiple perspectives on different exposure periods, surrounding environments, and different subtypes of ischemic stroke. Chen Gongbo et al. [ 49 ], Liang, Ruiming et al. [ 50 ] and Zhang, Yi et al. [ 51 ] conducted studies on the effects of long-term and short-term exposure to PM2.5 on the risk of ischemic stroke. They concluded that PM2.5 is associated with a high risk of ischemic stroke, regardless of the duration of exposure. Furthermore, studies have been conducted on the various components of PM2.5. Zhang et al. [ 51 ] discovered that exposure to NH4 + was linked to the highest risk of ischemic stroke, while polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PHS) were primarily associated with ischemic stroke. NH4 + originated mainly from residential and agricultural emissions, while PHS mainly came from automobiles and other related fuel combustion [ 52 , 53 ]. Many of these studies are based on large, multi-city samples, Tian Y et al. conducted a study based on data from the National Urban Workers’ Basic Medical Insurance database, which recorded 8,834,533 patients hospitalized for cardiovascular reasons in 184 cities in China from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2017. The study found that short-term exposure to PM2.5 was associated with increased hospital admissions for all major cardiovascular diseases except hemorrhagic stroke in China. This association was observed even when exposure levels did not exceed current regulatory limit [ 54 ], Cai M et al. found that exposure to PM2.5 was highly associated with a high risk of ischemic stroke recurrence in China, based on data from more than 1 million stroke patients [ 55 ]. The authors of Cluster 3 focus on risk assessment and model construction related to PM2.5. This provides a reference for preventing and treating PM2.5 exposure in the future.

The top 3 cited references were Brook Robert D et al. 2010 [ 40 ], Wellenius GA et al. 2012 [ 41 ], and Wellenius GA et al. 2005 [ 42 ]. The papers represent early and pioneering research in the field, providing a solid theoretical foundation for subsequent studies. The journals in which they were published are of high quality and widely accepted by researchers. The authors are also leading scientists in the field, and their research results are significantly forward-looking and instructive. The co-cited articles were divided into three categories. Cluster 1 was constructed around Wellenius GA et al. 2012 and Wellenius GA et al. 2005. These studies mainly demonstrated that PM2.5 contributes to the risk of ischemic stroke. Cluster 2 was constructed around Brook Robert D et al. In 2010, multiple cohorts and large sample data further confirmed that PM2.5 increases the risk of ischemic stroke. Cluster 3, as analysed by Tian Yh et al. in 2018, provides insight into the development trend and pattern of ischemic stroke caused by PM2.5 from a time series perspective.

To gain a better understanding of the dynamic developmental changes and patterns in the field, this study utilized Citespace for burst word analysis and Timezone analysis. The findings indicate that between 2006–2016, the field primarily focused on the relationship between air pollution and hospital admissions. The study found that air pollution significantly affected cardiovascular disease admissions, and when ischemic stroke was included in the study of cardiovascular disease. Between 2013 and 2017, researchers increasingly focused on the significant role of particulate matter in air pollution, including the effect of PM2.5 levels on ischemic stroke. The buzzwords during this period were ‘hospital admissions’ and ‘cardiovascular disease’. Between 2017 and 2020, scholars in the field shifted their focus towards the worldwide impact of air pollution. This period also saw a significant increase in the number of articles published in the field, with many developing countries joining the research efforts. The term ‘global burden’ was coined to describe this phenomenon. Since then, researchers have subdivided air pollution into different types, with PM2.5 receiving significant attention as a risk factor. This focus began with the explosion in 2022, which saw a peak in publications on the topic. In recent years, advancements in research methods have enabled researchers to conduct large-scale exposure risk assessments around the world regarding PM2.5 as a risk factor. This has provided valuable insights for the development of global climate policies. Therefore, the key terms for 2020–2024 are “PM2.5”, “risk factor”, and “modelling”.

This bibliometric study examines the impact of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke and serves as a valuable reference for those interested in this field. However, there are some limitations to consider. Firstly, the study only includes research articles, excluding conferences, letters, and articles in non-English languages, which limits the scope of the articles included. Secondly, the search was restricted to the WoSCC database. The WoSCC database covers most research articles, but it is challenging to guarantee the inclusion of all articles in the field. Despite these limitations, they do not affect the broad applicability of the findings of this study. The analyses are based on real-world data, and the results are reliable. They reflect the structural characteristics and dynamics of the field and are valuable for a comprehensive understanding of the field. Additionally, they are highly informative for the study of future trends in the field. There is a significant amount of high-quality evidence from clinical studies, epidemiological investigations, and large-sample model construction regarding the effect of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke. However, the mechanism behind this effect remains unclear and requires further research in the future.

The study of the effects of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke is a relevant and attractive field. Environmentalists, neurologists, and other professionals will continue to advance this field. In recent years, the addition of computationalists and meteorologists has led to the development of models and the use of meteorological satellite remote sensing. Bibliometrics analyses the research framework and hotspots of PM2.5’s impact on ischemic stroke, which is a significant driver of ischemic stroke. The model construction, based on large samples and multiple cohorts, effectively assessed the global exposure risk of PM2.5. This provides an important reference for the development of global climate change response strategies and helps researchers to have a more comprehensive understanding of the field, providing ideas for future research.

Data availability

No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Abbreviations

Airborne fine particulate matter aerodynamic diameter < 2.5 μm

Web Science Core

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

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Acknowledgements

We thank all study participants and data collectors for their participation and. cooperation. We also thank the Cerebrovascular Disease Center of Gansu Provincial. Hospital for their comprehensive cooperation and data support. We would like to. Thank the Key Laboratory of Cerebrovascular Disease of Gansu Province, China. (20JR10RA431), the Scientific Research Foundation of Gansu Provincial Hospital, China (Key Discipline Project) (2019 − 395), and Inhalable fine particulate matter. Promotes the activation of DAPKI/ERK pathway in brain tissue and its effect on. Ischemic stroke /ZX-62000001-2023-457.

This study was funded by the Key Laboratory of Cerebrovascular Disease of Gansu Province, China (20JR10RA431),the Scientific Research Foundation of Gansu Provincial Hospital, China (Key Discipline Project) (2019 − 395) and Inhalable fine particulate matter promotes the activation of DAPKI/ERK pathway in brain tissue and its effect on ischemic stroke /ZX-62000001-2023-457. There were no roles in study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or manuscript preparation.

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Liu, Q., Yang, S. & Chen, H. Global trends and hotspots in the study of the effects of PM2.5 on ischemic stroke. J Health Popul Nutr 43 , 133 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41043-024-00622-3

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Researcher discusses two measures that predict effective managers

by Liz Mineo, Harvard Gazette

Study pinpoints two measures that predict effective managers

Good managers are hard to find. Most companies pick managers based on personality traits, age, or experience—and according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper , they may be doing it wrong.

Co-authored by David Deming, Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, the study concludes that companies are better off when they select managers based on two measures highly predictive of leadership skills .

The Gazette talked to Deming about the study's findings. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the qualities that make a good manager, and why is it so hard to find them?

Being a good manager requires many different qualities that often don't exist in the same person. First is the ability to relate well to others, to create what Amy Edmondson and others have called psychological safety, meaning the ability to make people feel stable and secure in their role so they are comfortable with critical feedback. That's a key component of being a good manager.

Communication skills are also essential. As a manager, you should know that there's not one good way to deliver feedback to your workers because the words you use and the way you frame your statements also matter.

At the same time, you must also be analytically minded and open to different ways of doing things and be able to take a step back and reassess whether your team or organization is working as well as it could be.

Overall, being a good manager requires both interpersonal skills and analytical skills. You also need to have a strategic vision—which is something that our study does not capture. Managers must have a sense of what their organization is trying to accomplish. Any one of those skills is hard to find. Having all three, and knowing when to use them, is even more difficult.

One of the paper's most surprising findings is that people who self-nominate to be managers perform worse than those randomly assigned. Why is that?

In the study, we randomly assign the role of manager. That was half of the experiment. In the other half, we asked people which role they wanted, and we assigned the role of manager to the people with the greatest preferences for being in charge.

We found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are, on average, worse than randomly assigned managers. It's hard to know exactly why because there are a lot of factors in play, but we show evidence in the paper that they are overconfident in their own capabilities, and they think they understand other people better than they do. We all know people like that.

This was a surprising finding. And it's important, because interest in leadership plays a big role in how companies pick managers. Companies have their own hiring and employee evaluation policies of course—they don't pick managers randomly like we did—but it's surely true that preference for leadership plays a big part in who gets promoted to management.

For example, we find that men are much more likely to prefer being in charge, but they aren't any more effective than women in the role of manager.

The main lesson I take from this finding is that there's a big difference between preferences and skills; just because you want to be a manager doesn't mean you're going to be good at it. Organizations that take more scientific or analytical approaches to identifying good managers are going to come out ahead.

What are the best predictors for selecting a good manager, according to your paper?

It has nothing to do with how a person looks, how they speak, or what their preferences or personality traits are. None of those things are predictive. There are only two things that are: One is IQ as measured by the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, which measures general and fluid intelligence, spatial reasoning, problem-solving , etc.

But the one that's more interesting to me is a measure of what we call economic-decision-making skill, or the ability to allocate resources effectively, that my co-authors and I created in a different paper. We use that very same measure in this experiment, and we found that it is highly predictive of being a good manager.

Why do you think these two tests predict being a good manager, but other traits like age, experience, personality, or gender do not?

If you want to predict who's going to be going to be good at a specific performance task, in this case, managing a team to solve a problem, the best predictors are most closely related to what you're asking someone to do.

What matters is the ability to make decisions about the allocation of resources under time constraints ; how to organize and motivate the members of your team to produce the most output. The lesson for me is that it's a crutch to use personality traits and preferences to predict performance because they're not that closely related to the performance you're interested in.

We see this pattern elsewhere. There's a huge amount of research literature on figuring out who's going to be a good teacher in the classroom, and study after study finds that characteristics such as age, gender, education, SAT scores, college major don't do a very good job of predicting who's going to be a good teacher.

Yet if I put you in the classroom for a little bit of time and I see how much you improve student learning, that is a very good predictor, because it's very closely related to the thing you ask people to do. If you want to know who's going to be a good manager, make them manage. Don't just rely on personality characteristics, or whether they raise their hand to say, "I want to do it."

Why is it important to have good managers?

At the broadest level, it's important to have good management because companies, universities, and other organizations face such an open-ended strategic landscape. They must tackle a variety of issues, such as where they should direct their attention, what are the most important things to focus on, and how to deploy resources toward solving certain problems.

If you look at major corporations , they tend to be conglomerates that have many different divisions that do many different things. Google, just to give one example, in the beginning had a core product: a search engine. But now Google is Alphabet, and it still does search, but it also does venture investing, autonomous driving, drug discovery, and many other things.

If you zoom down to the micro level, a manager who leads a team of three or four employees faces the same sort of problems: What should I focus on? Who's going to do what? How do I give people feedback? What are each person's strengths and weaknesses?

To be an effective manager, you must think about how to assign workers to roles to achieve the greatest success, and you must know how to communicate with a person to help them improve. The skill of being a good manager is probably underappreciated. Good managers are not necessarily the most vocal leaders; sometimes they're quiet but effective, like diamonds in the rough.

The paper you and your co-authors wrote came up with a novel method to identify good managers. Can you explain?

It's a hard problem to solve, because part of what makes a good manager is the people they're supervising. If you give a manager a team of workers who aren't very capable, that team is going to do a poor job, and if the workers are all-stars, they will make the manager look good regardless. In other words, when a team succeeds, we don't know how much credit or blame to assign to the manager compared to other members of the team.

To solve that problem, we bring a bunch of people into a controlled lab setting, and we assign them a group task that they must do together. We randomly assign the role of manager to one of the three people on the team, and we ask them to lead their group in the task, and we see how well they do. Then we randomly assign each manager again to another group of workers.

Each time, as a manager, you're getting a different set of people, so we have a way to account for the quality of the workers you're getting. And since we're assigning workers, we can also identify who's a good worker because we can see their performance with different managers.

What do you think the paper's main contributions are to the literature of leadership and management in general?

I think the paper's main contribution is to open the door to the idea that we can be scientific and analytical about selecting managers and that management is not a squishy thing that we can never get our arms around.

We can measure management skill, and measuring it well unlocks huge productivity gains for organizations and for people. We're doing this experiment in a lab; it's not a real-world setting, but we are in talks with several folks to do this in the field. I do think it would work because we're asking people to manage and we're measuring their performance, and we're showing you that there's a repeatable predictive quality to this.

Our contribution is to outline a very simple methodology for measuring who's a good manager, and to say to people that they can use it. Figure it out in your own organization, and you will unlock big productivity gains.

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August 27, 2024

Queen’s Brian May Is a Champion for Badgers and Science

Queen guitarist Brian May has spent a decade studying the science of bovine tuberculosis, which can be carried by badgers, and has identified a new method of spread

By Elizabeth Gibney & Nature magazine

Brian May: “It kind of irks me that we don’t have a scientific paper out there.”

Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images

Brian May has many strings to his guitar. The musician, who is still touring with his rock band Queen, is also an astrophysicist, specializing in 3D stereoscopic images of distant bodies. And to the UK public, he’s also a passionate campaigner for animal rights.

After abandoning his PhD at Imperial College London in 1974 to follow his musical passions, May finally returned to complete his doctorate in 2007. Soon after, the rock star embroiled himself in a polarizing scientific row over whether the European badger ( Meles meles ) was causing mass infection of cattle with bovine tuberculosis (TB). Each year, the problem costs the UK government more than £100 million (US$130 million) and leads to the slaughter of more than 20,000 cows.

Some scientists initially backed the government’s policy of culling badgers — 230,000 have been killed since 2013 — although many now doubt the approach’s effectiveness. The past government had planned to phase out culling in favour of vaccination, but 20 culling licences were issued this year. The new Labour government has said that it plans to end culling, but these licences will continue.

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In a BBC documentary airing in the United Kingdom on 23 August, May describes his decade-long research project to understand what is behind bovine TB. Alongside him on the programme is Anne Brummer, chief executive of their co-founded wildlife charity, the Save Me Trust. “He lives and sleeps this,” says Brummer. “He hates injustice and is a very passionate, compassionate person. He just wants to solve these problems.”

May spoke to Nature about how his scientific skills have been essential to his work, and the “monstrous” findings made by his team, which includes Brummer, farmer Robert Reid and veterinary surgeon Dick Sibley.

Brian May in stable with two farmers and cows.

The Save Me Trust chief executive Anne Brummer ( left ) and Brian May ( second from left ) meeting two farmers in the BBC documentary Brian May: The Badgers, the Farmers and Me.

Athena Films/BBC

What has the influence of your scientific background been on your work with animals? Do you think it gave you more confidence?

Absolutely. The scientific method is something precious, and you do learn it — the hard way — if you’re doing a PhD. Everything comes down to asking the right questions and keeping an open mind, and resisting the terrible inclination that scientists have, because they’re human beings, of finding what you expect to find. We’ve all been told that badgers are how the pathogen is spread, so we look for that pattern. And, sadly, I think that’s why the myth has perpetuated.

Were you convinced from the beginning that badgers were not causing the spread of TB in cattle?

I was always suspicious, but I didn’t have anything to justify my position. But I felt that even if they were responsible, it wasn’t their fault. I remember being at a Zoological Society meeting around 13 years ago, where I had the temerity to stand up and say, “Doesn’t anybody think this is morally wrong?”, and I felt like a child, because everybody looked at me with such scorn. I realized that the only way to get anywhere was to stop shouting, start listening and get into the science. Along the way I think we’ve made breakthroughs that I didn’t even dream of making.

You’ve spent the past 12 years as part of a research team on the Gatcombe farm in Devon, near the south coast of England, studying TB transmission. What did you find?

We developed a view on how the mycobacterium responsible for TB transmits from one animal to another. TB has classically been known as a respiratory disease, but our discovery is that a cow doesn’t contract TB by breathing in something, it contracts it by eating the pathogen from defecation from a neighbouring cow. It’s a monstrous discovery, because once you start understanding your enemy, then you can start to defeat it. Now we know that the thing is passed from cow to cow, because of poor hygiene.

How does testing contribute to the problem?

We also found that the [government-sanctioned] skin test for TB is as little as 50% accurate. That’s a terrible thing to discover, because you might as well toss a coin. We discovered that one cow had been through the skin test 30 times and pronounced healthy, and when it went for a postmortem, it was riddled with TB. So, the skin test is the villain of the piece, and the fact that farmers are relying on this incredibly inaccurate test to remove cows from their precious herds and take them off to slaughter is a scandal.

Do you have any plans to put your findings into a scientific paper?

Absolutely, yes. That’s definitely one of our next steps. It kind of irks me that we don’t have a scientific paper out there, but all in good time.

What makes you so convinced that badgers play no part in transmission?

On Robert Reid’s farm we, for some time, had a healthy herd with an infected population of badgers around it. And all through this period, almost 10 years, there’s never been a single infection from the cows that could graze in the fields, near where the badgers live. All have been in the sheds.

There is also a farmer in Tiverton who built an amazing fence five miles long around his beef herd, to keep the wildlife out. Eventually, he lost half his herd. How did that happen? It’s highly likely that a new bull — shown as healthy by the skin test — is the way this herd became destroyed. It’s likely that this is a pattern we’ve seen in many other places, as well. I would like farmers to see the documentary and think, OK, maybe we’re ready for a change. We need to change so many methods in cattle farming to solve this problem.

In the film, you say that speaking out against badger-culling has become as important to you as your music. Where does astrophysics fit in?

It’s right up there. I’m still doing astrophysics. I’m privileged to be part of a few teams of exploration in NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. I have a great time doing that. What I contribute is stereoscopy and it’s been a lot of fun, because it gives you very human insights into the exploration of these wonderful places they’re visiting.

What does the bovine TB affair teach us about science and policymaking?

All I’d like to say is that it worries me that the peer-review process can embody flaws. If you get the people to peer review who are in the same clique, you’re not going to peruse the material thoroughly enough.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on August 22, 2024 .

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Nurses’ role in obesity management in adults in primary healthcare settings worldwide: a scoping review.

1. Introduction

Significance, 2.1. protocol, 2.2. eligibility criteria, 2.3. information sources, 2.4. search strategy, 2.5. selection of sources of evidence, 2.6. process of data extraction, 2.7. thematic analysis, 3.1. characteristics of the studies, 3.2. synthesis of results, 3.2.1. patient-centred care, 3.2.2. patient assessments, 3.2.3. therapeutic nursing interventions, 3.2.4. patient education, 3.2.5. care management, 3.2.6. professional development, 4. discussion, limitations, supplementary materials, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, acknowledgments, conflicts of interest.

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Click here to enlarge figure

	Inclusion	Exclusion
Population	Registered nurses Case management nurses General practice nurses	Student nurses Advanced practice nurses Nurse practitioner (NP) Clinical nurse specialist (CNS) Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM)
Concept	Individuals with obesity Adults (19–64 years old) Nurses’ role or intervention	RN’s role indecipherable from other disciplines Primary focus on other disease (e.g., cancer, serious mental illness, NAFLD, T2DM, etc.) Bariatric and pharmaceutical related interventions Population who requires expertise beyond scope of this paper (i.e., perinatal, postnatal, prenatal, and parenting and people with developmental, and intellectual disabilities)
Context	Worldwide Primary healthcare setting District nursing General practice Community settings (home care, occupational health, or faith-based)	Any setting outside inclusion criteria

	Medical Subject Headings (MeSHs) and Descriptors	String/ Boolean	Keywords (Title or Abstract)
Population	“nurses” OR “nursing” OR “Public Health Service Nurses”	Or	nurs*
Population	And
Concept	“role” OR “Nursing Role” OR “Nursing Interventions” OR “Professional Role” OR “Delivery of Health Care” OR “Practice Patterns, Nurses” OR	Or	role* or “nurs* intervention” OR “nurs strateg” OR “nurs role” OR “nurs* guided” OR “nurse-directed” OR “nurse-led” OR “nurse-managed” OR “nurs* function*”
	And
	“obesity” OR “Obesity, Morbid” OR “weight control” OR “Weight Reduction Programs” OR “weight management” OR “obesity management” OR “Body Weight Maintenance” OR “Body Weight Changes” OR “weight loss+” OR “Weight Reduction Programs+” OR “Body Weight” OR “overweight” OR “body mass index” OR “Obesity (Attitudes Toward)”	Or	obes* OR “high BMI” OR “high body mass index” OR “weight control” OR “weight reduction” OR “weight management” OR “overweight”
Context	Omitted (too restrictive)		Omitted (too restrictive)

Frist Author/Year/Citation		Title	Study Design	Population	Setting	Country
Barrea (2021) [ ]		The role of the nurse in the obesity clinic: a practical guideline.	Review	RNs caring for people living with obesity (PwO)	Outpatient obesity clinics	Italy
Braga (2020) [ ]		Actions of nurses toward obesity in primary health care units.	Qualitative	Primary healthcare nurses (PHNs)	Primary healthcare Units	Brazil
Brewah (2018) [ ]		Can community nurses take on obesity?	Commentary	District/ community RNs caring for homebound PwO	Home care	U.K.
Campbell- Scherer (2019) [ ]		Changing provider behaviour to increase nurse visits for obesity in family practice: the 5As Team randomized controlled trial (RCT).	Mixed-methods, RCT, and qualitative	Chronic disease RNs in a primary care clinic providing care for PwO	Primary care network clinics	Canada
Fernández- Ruiz (2018) [ ]		Short-medium-long-term efficacy of interdisciplinary intervention against overweight and obesity: randomized controlled clinical trial.	RCT	Multidisciplinary program for PwO led and coordinated by RNs	Community care centre	Spain
Fernández- Ruiz (2018) [ ]		Impact of the I(2)AO(2) interdisciplinary program led by nursing on psychological comorbidity and quality of life: randomized controlled clinical trial.	RCT	Multidisciplinary program for PwO led and coordinated by RNs	Community care centre	Spain
Govindasamy (2023) [ ]		Experiences of overweight and obese patients with diabetes and practice nurses during implementation of a brief weight management intervention in general practice settings serving culturally and linguistically diverse disadvantaged populations.	Qualitative	RNs PwO who are culturally and linguistically diverse with socioeconomic disadvantage	General practice office	Australia
Hinks (2022) [ ]		Exploring community nurses’ views on the implementation of a local weight management pathway.	Qualitative	District and community RNs	Community care	Isle of Man
Kelley (2018) [ ]		The role of the faith community nurse in weight management.	Opinion	Faith community RNs providing care for PwO	Faith community setting (church)	USA
Palmeira (2019) [ ]		Effect of remote nursing monitoring on overweight in women: clinical trial.	RCT	RNs providing remote weight monitoring for PwO	Primary care Remote nursing	Brazil
Parker	2018 [ ]	Preventing chronic disease in patients with low health literacy using eHealth and teamwork in primary healthcare: protocol for a cluster randomised controlled trial.	Protocol	RNs caring for PwO	General practice	Australia
	2022 [ ]	Preventing chronic disease in overweight and obese patients with low health literacy using eHealth and teamwork in primary healthcare (HeLP-GP): a cluster randomised controlled trial.	RCT	RNs caring for PwO	General practice	Australia
	2024 [ ]	Exploring organisational readiness to implement a preventive intervention in Australian general practice for overweight and obese patients: key learnings from the HeLP-GP trial.	Qualitative	RNs caring for PwO	General practice	Australia
Shaji et al. (2023) [ ]		Effectiveness of nurse-led lifestyle modification intervention on obesity among young women in India.	Quantitative	RN caring for PwO	General practice office and telehealth	India
Virtanen (2021) [ ]		The impact of lifestyle counselling on weight management and quality of life among working-age females.	Quantitative cohort study	RNs caring for PwO	Primary healthcare	Finland

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Piwowarczyk, E.; MacPhee, M.; Howe, J. Nurses’ Role in Obesity Management in Adults in Primary Healthcare Settings Worldwide: A Scoping Review. Healthcare 2024 , 12 , 1700. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12171700

Piwowarczyk E, MacPhee M, Howe J. Nurses’ Role in Obesity Management in Adults in Primary Healthcare Settings Worldwide: A Scoping Review. Healthcare . 2024; 12(17):1700. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12171700

Piwowarczyk, Emilia, Maura MacPhee, and Jo Howe. 2024. "Nurses’ Role in Obesity Management in Adults in Primary Healthcare Settings Worldwide: A Scoping Review" Healthcare 12, no. 17: 1700. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12171700

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