Time for More Living Literature Reviews
A Third Anniversary Post
It’s the third anniversary today of the launch of New Things Under the Sun! So today, we’re going meta and talking about the state the living literature review.
What’s a living literature review?
“Living Literature Review” is the best name I’ve come up what I’m writing here. The key characteristics I have in mind are:
Collection of articles
Synthesize recent academic research.
Written for non-specialists
Rigorous and credible
Updatable
One primary author with relevant expertise
See this longer explanation for more discussion and some justification for these characteristics.
In my case, I have a website that meets the above characteristics, but I also send out new articles and updates to existing articles via this substack.
What are some examples of living literature reviews?
As I’ll discuss towards the end of this post, Open Philanthropy has a program to support people writing living literature reviews. Besides New Things Under the Sun, we’re currently supporting three other reviews, presented here in order from newest to most established.
Some Are Useful
Tom Gebhart, a University of Minnesota Research Scientist writes about how AI is used in different domains of science. For example, he is in the midst of publishing a series on the use of AI in weather forecasting. But his most recent piece (not on weather forecasting) is particularly relevant to New Things readers.
Check out the website or subscribe to the substack version.
Good Questions Review
Paul Kellner, Research Fellow at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, recently launched a review on designing and implementing more valuable social science research. It’s very meta: academic social science on producing good academic social science! His first two posts are Do research findings need to be timely to influence policymaking? and Choosing policy relevant research questions.
Check out the website here.
Existential Crunch
Florian Jehn, Data Science Lead at ALLFED, writes on what we know about societal collapses, both in the distant past and (potentially, but I hope not) the near future. Here’s a fairly recent post:
Check out the website or subscribe to the substack.
Hopefully this is just the start: we’ve made some additional grants to support more living literature reviews which will be coming soon. Meanwhile other academics write newsletters that I think are quite similar in spirit: Emily Oster’s ParentData comes to mind, or Alice Evans’ The Great Gender Divergence.
Time for more living literature reviews
The genre may be tiny today, but someday I hope there will be hundreds of living literature reviews, maybe thousands. For anything you want to know about, I would love for you to able to read an accessible, short, current, credible synthesis of frontier research.1
I think such a world would be a healthier innovation ecosystem. It would be easier for policymakers, voters, and other decision-makers to understand what research says about a particular topic. It would be easier for aspiring researchers to survey the landscape of possibility and race to the academic frontier of their choice. It would also be easier for active researchers to quickly pivot to new topics.2 And maybe it would even be easier to justify public support for academic research, when academia can more easily point to accessible explanations of what it is doing.
But for today, I think it would be great if we could just get some more examples of the genre, to test out if they’re really as valuable as I think they might be.
Should you write a living literature review?
If you’re an academic who believes in the value of the work done in your specialty, you should consider writing a living literature review. We have a program at Open Philanthropy to provide financial support to help you work on it. If your employer is supportive, these grants can be used to reduce teaching loads, provide summer salary support, or allow you to reduce other duties to allow you to work quarter-time on writing and maintaining a living literature review.
I think of writing a living literature review as sort of analogous to teaching a college course on a topic. Indeed, when I was at Iowa State University I did create and teach a course on the Economics of Innovation. A key difference, of course, is that the reach of writing online can be dramatically higher. I’m proud of the course I created, but it had 12 students and New Things Under the Sun has more than 16,000 subscribers. And nobody is reading New Things Under the Sun just to meet some kind of credit requirement for graduating.
Like a college course whose syllabus you might update once a semester to reflect research, the updatable format of a living literature review lets you keep what you write reflective of frontier research. But my efforts on New Things Under the Sun accumulate in a way that teaching efforts didn’t. The majority of my time working on New Things Under the Sun goes into writing new posts, rather than updating old ones. In contrast, after an iteration or two, the majority of my teaching sessions were a variation on something I had taught before. Over time that adds up. Today there are 85 posts up on the website, delving3 much deeper into niches than I would ever be able to justify during a 15-week course.
More selfishly, writing a living literature review is also valuable to me on a personal level. It’s a commitment device to keeping up with the literature. And figuring out how to explain something in plain language forces me to understand what I read at a higher level than if I was reading purely for my own interest. New Things Under the Sun has also become a very useful personal database / set of notes - when I need to find or refresh my memory about an article, it’s the first place I turn.
More broadly, writing online can be good for your career, especially when that work is closely related to your other professional duties, as writing a living literature review is for an academic. I think this is especially the case now. Every field has a lot of good researchers. Most fields do not have someone writing a good living literature review. Personally, I owe most of the professional opportunities I have had to New Things Under the Sun.
So I hope that if you are an academic yourself, you’ll consider it. If you’re interested, please drop me an email (matt.clancy@openphilanthropy.org) to chat more about it.
One objection to thousands of separate living literature reviews might be that a single large language model will eventually be able to do this more broadly and more deeply than humans. AI is not there yet, but I don’t know how long this state of affairs will hold. That said, writing a living literature review is the kind of thing that I think is valuable to readers today. It’s kind of beside the point whether it will also be worth doing for a long time to come.
Good ideas are often born when someone draws a connection between two previously disparate concepts.
I chose to use “delve”, this post isn’t drafted by chatGPT.