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

I came across an interesting example of a literature review the other day and thought it was worth sharing. The review was in a paper by Glowacki and colleagues (2020)*, who were reporting on a study to see if a series of grant writing workshops run with academic staff had actually increased the number of successful grant applications.  What caught my eye was that the review was systematised . So what is that and why is it important if you are grappling with a literature review, or helping someone else grapple with one?  To answer that, I need to back up a few steps and explain  systematic review studies .  If you are doing a qualitative systematic review study, or its quantitative counterpart, a meta-analysis, you are essentially doing a study of studies.  That is, you have a research question you want to answer, but instead of interviewing people or running an experiment or analysing a corpus of newspaper articles (or social media posts or whatever), you locat...

When you sit down to start your literature review and come to the realization that you have no idea what to do, there are any number of guidebooks out there you could consult. But how helpful are they? I recently started thinking about this when I happened to pull my copy of Phillips & Pugh's How to Get a Phd*  off my book shelf.  I smiled to myself as I dusted it off and thumbed through the pages, catching sight of the notes I'd written in the margin. But what IS my position?! I had scrawled urgently on one page. 'Researchers examine data critically' I had emphatically underlined on another (48). In many ways this was a useful book. It had a wealth of information on the nature of a PhD, what it was and wasn't; about the postgraduate and PhD system in the UK; about the supervision process; about the nature of research; and so on.  Another thing I remembered, however, was how confused I was about that thing called  the literature review . I do not blame Phillips...