How not to do a literature review

This is a step-by-step guide to how to do a literature review as badly as possible, following the remarkably good example of a bad review provided by Rushton & Templer (2012). For additional debunking of this "review article" (if it even deserves to be called that), see this blog post by another blogger and the comment section thereof.

Step 1: Come up with a predetermined conclusion based on that of your own research, and make sure the entire review article fits this theme. This second part is important, so keep it in mind for later on. 

Here's what this looks like in our example: if you're "race realists" like Rushton & Templer, don't pay attention to the numerous criticisms of your methodology that have been published over the past several decades. Instead, make a bald-faced statement in the abstract like this: "Both within human populations (e.g., siblings), and between populations (e.g., races, nations, states), studies find that darker pigmented people average higher levels of aggression and sexual activity (and also lower IQ)." But if you wanna compete with the masters of writing bad review articles, don't stop there: make sure to shoehorn the bald-faced statement into your own pet theory to create the appearance of empirical support for the theory. 

So how do R&T do this? Right after the quote I included in the paragraph above (from the abstract), they write: "We conceptualize skin color as a multigenerational adaptation to differences in climate over the last 70,000 years as a result of “cold winters theory” and the “Out-of-Africa” model of human origins. We propose life history theory to explain the covariation found between human (and non-human) pigmentation and variables such as birth rate, infant mortality, longevity, rate of HIV/AIDS, and violent crime."

Step 2: Cite a bunch of articles published by you and your BFFs who totally agree with all your ideas--don't let any of the haters who say you're just part of a tiny clique of ideologically motivated cranks get you down! No no, what you need to do is cite articles published by you and other researchers with the exact same view on this subject. Make sure that you do not include any studies criticizing your or your buddies' work.

So when you're discussing the putative relationship between race and violent behavior, for example, you don't want to include any of the numerous papers that have criticized your methodology. No, instead, you want to do something like what Rushton & Templer did in the "Human studies" section of their paper, when they wrote,

" In the US, Taylor and Whitney (1999) analyzed the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics and National Crime Victimization Surveys from the US Department of Justice and found that since record keeping began at the turn of the century and throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, African Americans engaged in proportionately more acts of violence than other groups...Rushton and Whitney (2002) analyzed the 1993–1996 INTERPOL Yearbooks and found that across 100 countries, the rate of murder, rape, and serious assault is four times higher in African and Caribbean countries than elsewhere in the world. In violent crimes per 100,000 people, the rate for African countries was 149; for European, 42; and for Asian, 35. These results are similar to those carried out on other data sets from INTEROL and the United Nations. They show the Black overrepresentation in violent crime to be a worldwide phenomenon."

The key lessons to take from the above passage, students, are to only include studies by hereditarian "race realist" researchers like Rushton himself, Jared Taylor (founder of white nationalist magazine American Renaissance), and Glayde Whitney (animal behavior geneticist turned white supremacist).

Then they follow step 2 even more later in the same section, citing a paper on psychopathic personality by eugenics-advocating psychologist Richard Lynn, again without mentioning published criticisms of this research or other studies that contradict it.

Later they one-up themselves yet again by citing two studies on race and sexual behavior co-authored by Rushton (one from 1987 and one from 1988) without mentioning the numerous criticisms of both studies (e.g. here and here). 

3. Sprinkle a bit of sources by third parties in that vaguely have to do with your argument and subtly imply that they totally back up your conclusions when they do no such thing. This may be because they don't control for confounding factors (as is the case in the example discussed below). Just cite racial disparities in various outcomes that you're looking for without considering representativeness of samples, how outdated they are, or potential environmental causes of the observed disparities (this last one is especially important). Just assume everything's mainly genetic in origin.

Let's take another look at the R&T paper: 

"In Canada, a government commission found that Blacks were five times more likely to be in jail than Whites and 10 times more likely than Asians (Ontario, 1996). In Britain, the Home Office (1999) found that Blacks, who were 2% of the general population, made up 15% of the prison population."

In the quoted passage from R&T (2012) reproduced above, the authors misleadingly cited 2 government reports (one in Canada and one in Britain) that look at racial disproportionality in prison populations without considering the sources of this disparity. Then they imply that this disparity implies not only true race differences in offending, but also that this, in turn, validates their claim that individuals with darker color skin (i.e. Blacks) are more likely to engage in violence than are members of other races. Why is this misleading? Because 1) Differential treatment (i.e. discrimination) in the criminal justice system at any or all of its many stages undoubtedly plays at least a small role in the disparity in question, and 2) there is no reason to assume that all the crimes for which individuals in any country are incarcerated are those of violence (unless you wanted to make a point to fit your narrative with no regard for its accuracy, of course). Of course, this also ignores the very fundamental and important fact that what is or is not a crime is not invariant across time or cultures, but instead is a social construct determined by forces in a specific society.  

Next, you might want to add some statements about race differences in STD rates, and you should know by now to avoid even discussing environmental factors like incarceration that may contribute to such differences. Here's how the experts do it: "African descended people are over-represented in rates of sexually transmitted diseases [STDs] such as syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia, and HIV/AIDS (US Centers for Disease Control, 2009). Of the more than one million people living in the US with HIV/AIDS in 2007, almost half (46%) were Black. The Black–White difference in HIV/AIDS is found worldwide with high levels in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Botswana (24.8%), South Africa (17.8%), Zambia (14.6%) and Zimbabwe (14.3%) (CIA World Factbook, 2010)."

4. Make very broad and controversial statements to support your arguments. Be careful not to cite sources for these statements, which is probably just what the haters want you to do.

There is perhaps no better example of this than in the review we are examining here: immediately after the excerpt quoted above, R&T write, "Since victims’ surveys tell a similar story, the differences in arrest statistics cannot just be attributed to police prejudice." No citation is given for this claim, despite it being an obviously controversial one.

5. Last but not least, make sure to cite outdated sources rather than more recent ones that contradict your overall argument.

R&T follow this point while also following point #2 (i.e. don't mention critics), when they write the following: "...Blacks have the most testosterone (Ellis & Nyborg, 1992), which helps to explain their higher levels of athletic ability (Entine, 2000). Testosterone acts as a “master switch.” It goes everywhere in the body and affects many bio-behavioral systems. It affects self-concept, aggression, altruism, crime, and sexuality, not just in men, but in women too. Testosterone controls muscle mass and the deepening of the voice in the teenage years. It also explains why Black women have the most premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and East Asians the least." 

Hoo boy, there's a lot of BS there! But the most salient point relevant to point #5 is that they include only a paper from 26 years ago (Ellis & Nyborg), while neglecting to mention more recent studies like this one and this one which find no race differences in testosterone levels.