Insights for 2025: Remembering What the Dissertation Literature Review is For

 Happy New Year! 🥳 Here it is, the start of January, often a time to sit down and make some firm resolutions that, this year, we are really going to stick to. So if you have your bullet point list already populated with things like:

🔆 Get up an hour earlier and write for 1 hour everyday

🔆 Read and annotate 5 articles every week

🔆 Have the complete first draft of my literature review chapter done by March 31st, 

great stuff! Keep going.

This time of year is also, however, a good time to take stock -- to step back and reassess things. Are we doing the right things for the right reasons? Over the course of a year, it is very easy to get so bogged down in the details that we lose sight of our real mission. We set out with a clear vision, translate that vision into goals, and then set out the tasks to achieve those goals. But over time, the tasks tend to take on a life of their own and without realising it they become the mission. Just get to the end of the list! we say to ourselves, hoping that by the time Friday comes we'll find most of our tasks done and crossed off. 📝

I think this tendency to slip into mindlessly chasing tasks happens because we forget to take into account how much we'll learn and develop as we spend a year working on something. Our overall mission may stay the same, but what we do to achieve it needs to be periodically updated as we become more advanced in our skills and knowledge. Ticking things off our list is excellent (and if you read this blog regularly, you know I love lists!). 📋 ✔ But every now and again, we need to step back and think about what it is that is driving our list in the first place. 

And that is what today's blog is about. As we set out on a brand new year, are we still aligned with our guiding star? 🌟As we sit amongst our piles of papers and notes, digging our way through, do we remember why we are doing a literature review in the first the place? Or are we demotivated because we have we lost sight of what it's all for?

Regular readers of this blog will know that the purpose of your literature review is to make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. And this is true -- that is what your literature review should do. But why should it do that? Why is it necessary to establish why your question should be asked? Or, as a number of my students have asked over the years, Why can't we just write about our stuff? Why can't we just ask and answer our question and leave it at that?

🔑 My answer is this: we make the case for why our question needs to be asked in order to identify how the answer we come up with counts as a contribution -- how it advances the sum of human learning. What new and unique piece of knowledge does your research put in the world and why does it matter? There is no way to know that if you don't know the state of your field. How does what you now know build on what we already know? You can't see that unless you have identified the prevailing patterns and trends in what we already know. That is what the textbooks and how-to guides mean when they talk about mastering the literature or effective evaluation or locating your study with respect previous research.

Was this blog helpful for you or your students? Want to know more about translating the why of doing a literature review into the how? 

✅ Hop onto my website www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290 and drop me a message to talk about master classes, day-long workshops, or short courses. I'd love to hear from you 😊