Your literature review should cover the relevant literature.
Well of course it should. This is a piece of advice you’ll often find in textbooks on doing dissertations. It seems so obvious that it is easy to skim over it. Cover the relevant literature. Right. Go it. And how hard could it be? That article is relevant, that one isn’t, job done.
Or is it? 😕 Like many things you’ll discover as you do your literature review, deciding what is relevant turns out to be surprisingly complex. There is more here to think about than you might have first supposed, and that is what this blog is about.
In some cases, you will indeed find that one source is clearly relevant and another clearly isn’t. In many other cases, however, there are at least two intermediate categories between relevant and not relevant:
✅ don’t know yet, and
✅ marginally relevant.
We’ll deal with each one in turn.
There will be times, especially in the early stages of your dissertation, when you simply don’t know yet if something is relevant. This often shows up as doubt. Does it fit? Could it fit? Do I need to tweak my research question? Am I on the right track? You have your two clear piles – relevant and not relevant, but every time you plonk the article into the discard pile, you fish it out again. What if it is relevant? What if I haven’t understood it properly? I just don’t know! 😱
This indecision may feel frustrating, but it is a healthy part of the process. Your research project develops as you go, so there will be many points along the way when you aren’t immediately sure about something. That is okay. 😊👍 The thing to do is to recognise that the temporary indecision is actually a decision: you don’t know yet. In between Relevant and Not Relevant, make yourself a pile for Not Sure Yet. For every source in this pile, record the basics (what the study is asking, what it found, what its methods were) and why you aren’t sure. Be as specific here as you can. Then, just leave it in the Not Sure Yet pile and go on to the next one.
Maybe in a week, or two, or in a month, or in a year, you will encounter another article and say Ah ha! Now I know how that article is relevant! 😃 Or maybe, as you periodically review your Not Sure Yet pile from an increasingly sophisticated vantage point, you’ll be able to see at a glance why the source that originally gave you such angst either is or is not relevant.
This brings us to the second point, the marginally relevant sources. Dealing with these takes up a surprising amount of time. At first, this seems counter intuitive, as marginally relevant suggests something you can deal with briefly. In your final write-up, this will be true – your treatment of what is marginally relevant will be brief. But getting to that confident articulation of what is worth mentioning but not centrally relevant involves some complex thinking and careful analysis. 🤔
An example from my own practice in writing literature reviews may be helpful here. I give such examples from time to time in this blog because with my own work and I can point to the decision-making process I went through as I wrestled a pile of reading notes into a finished article. This process goes straight to the heart of the matter when it comes to writing a literature review (or anything, really), but I find that what it entails is often missing from the textbooks and how-guides. I therefore share it with you here. Was it helpful? ✍ Let me know in the comments! ✍
This comes from my paper on weird -y suffixes in the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS). I approached this from a linguistic perspective, as my area of expertise is stylistics (the study of choice in language). As I was reading the literature on Buffy for my review, I noticed that the bulk of the work was coming from other fields. That body of work was relevant, as it was on the text I was studying, but not centrally so, as it was not interested in matters of language. In the final version of my paper, all of this work was dealt with in a single sentence:
‘In the growing body of BTVS literature, two areas of enquiry have emerged as particularly salient: interpreting the vampires and demons as symbols for society’s fears (Erickson, 2002; Jowett, 2002; Krzywinska, 2002); and interrogating the transgressive potential of the show with respect to gender (Braun, 2001: 91; Graham, 2002; Levy, 2003; Owen, 1999; Pender 2002; Williams, 2002); race and class (Alessio, 2001; Edwards, 2002); and power (Buinicki and Enns, 2002; Playden, 2001)’ (Mandala 2007: 53).
Getting to this single sentence, however, took several months of work, primarily for the following reasons.
📌 There are 13 papers cited here so in the first place I had to read and annotate them all. Yes, they were all marginally relevant, but I still had to read them all carefully to decide why and how.
📌After reading and annotating I had to analyse my notes, which I did through a process of thematic coding. The result of that analysis is presented succinctly above: this body of work comes down to two main areas, a dissection of fears and an interest in transgressive potential. The second area had three sub-themes, gender; race/class; and power. The 13 papers did not announce themselves as belonging to these themes; rather, that was something I had to decide and articulate after thinking carefully about the body of work as whole (instead of one study at a time).
📌 To deal with the theme on transgressive potential, I had to come to grips with media and cultural studies, a subject outside my own area of expertise. Having trained as a linguist, I had never covered this but no matter -- it was still my responsibility. This meant taking some time to dig into the tertiary sources to figure out what this field was about so that I could fully understand the papers that emerged from them.
📌 To put it all together, I drafted many versions of my review. Does it surprise you to learn that what eventually became a single sentence in my final version was originally 6 pages long? That might sound like wasted time, but each articulation of the longer version increased my mastery over the previous work and why it mattered to my research. Over time, this drafting process gradually distilled for me what was most essential, allowing me to deal fairly but briefly with the marginally relevant material so that I could expand on what was centrally relevant.
And there you have it – what it really takes to deal with sources that are marginally relevant. The next time you come across a paper that deals briefly with marginal material, spend a bit of time over it. What amount and kind of work went into it? What can you learn from that about doing your own review?
If anyone is interested in my paper or the sources cited therein, the references is Mandala, S. (2007). ‘Solidarity and the Scoobies: An Analysis of the -y Suffix in the Television Series Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. Language and Literature 16 (1): 53-73.
Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater personal and professional success through more effective writing and use of language.
She specialises in dissertation literature review training for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course.
🟩 Visit her website: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk
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