Literature Reviews: A Blog for the Exasperated from Writing Works Consulting

 No, seriously, it is.  Stay with me on this one for a bit, whether you are writing a literature view or teaching others how to write them.  You can think of reading notes as 'data' you have collected on an 'unknown culture' (the literature in your field).  Think of yourself as an ethnographer or anthropologist.  You have been a 'participant observer' in this culture (spending hours and hours in the library or on-line), 'talking' with the 'members' of this culture (reading and thinking about the articles, essays, and books) and seeking to inhabit their point of view by finding out what they say and why they say it (taking notes on the findings, methods, and methodological stances in previous research).  You've been asking questions about what they tell you (interrogating these findings, speculating about why, ultimately, they matter), and you have started to trace some connections and contrasts in what all the 'members' say; that is, ...

  This is a question I often get from my students, perhaps because they  have heard things like  Your literature review has to be up-to-date  or  You have to know what is current on your topic.  While both of these things are true, it does not follow that you should as a matter of course exclude older sources in your field.  While this is one to discuss with your supervisor, in general terms my view is that there is no reason to ignore older sources just because they are old, and there can be many good reasons to include them.  You can be up-to-date and deal with older sources.  As the author of the literature review, you decide what gets covered and what doesn't, and that decision should be made on the basis of what the source in your hand contributes to the synthesis you are writing, not on some arbitrary cut-off date for publication. In any field, there will be the pioneering papers, the game-changing books, the edited collections from the...