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 & Pugh's book for this, as I think this confusion had more to do with the fact that very little in my academic life up to that point had prepared me to understand the advice. The same thing happened (and still happens) to me with technical manuals of any kind. Perhaps that is why IKEA manuals dispensed with text and just used pictures. Alas, pictures alone will not help us figure out how to do a literature review.
So what was it that confused me? I looked further at other things I had underlined. I had to demonstrate that I was 'aware of the present state of the art: what developments, controversies, breakthroughs are currently exciting or engaging the leading practitioners and thus pushing forward thinking in the subject' (57). And, I had to show all this to 'professional standard' (57). Excellent! I plunged into the stack of articles I had (it was an actual paper stack in those days). I recognized the breakthroughs, I could see what the consensus view was shaping up to be, and it soon became clear who the big names were and what their ideas were. I dutifully wrote all that down. But what then? Crestfallen, I realized that all I had was a glorified list. Somehow, I didn't think that would count as 'professional standard'. It was description, and as Phillips and Pugh quite rightly and clearly said 'a mere encyclopaedic listing' (57) would not do. And yet, that was what I kept on producing as I drafted. I had by that time read countless other literature reviews (more good advice), but wasn't able to benefit from that because I didn't know what I was looking for.
It wasn't until I read that 'key activities' (57) in doing my literature review would be 'organizing the material in an interesting and useful way, evaluating the contributions of others (and justifying the criticisms, of course), identifying trends in research activity, defining areas of theoretical and and empirical weakness' (57). Ah -- now I was getting somewhere. Organize it all. I like organizing things. But organize it how? Eventually, after hitting on the idea of turning my notes -- my list -- into cards with one observation, thought, quote, etc. per card, I understood that I was making an argument, and my position was establishing why my research question should be asked -- why, as Phillips and Pugh point out, other people in my field would want to listen to what I had to say (57).
Interestingly, Phillips and Pugh do make the point that the thesis needs to be an argument, but in a different section, on writing up (64). It took me a while to put the two things together because I had wrongly assumed that writing up was something I would do all at the end. And once I had figured it out, then I could read other literature reviews and notice things like how they were structured and how they presented evidence and how they articulated their arguments. Once I knew what I was doing, the guidebook make perfect sense. Interesting, that.
* Phillips, E.M. & Pugh, D.S. 1987. How to Get a PhD: A Handbook for Students and Their Supervisors. 2nd ed. Buckingham: Open University Press.
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