Can I Use Blog Posts in My Literature Review?

 Ah – now that’s an interesting question 🤔. 

Usually, the answer is something like this: 

‼️ NO, absolutely NOT, blog posts can be written by anyone on anything and are NOT reliable sources. They are NOT the research literature. DON’T go there‼️

Generally, this is good advice. Blog posts can indeed be written by anyone on anything, they do not generally go through any rigorous process of quality control before they are published, and they may or may not be reliable. As the author of a post, you sit down, write your piece, do such revision and editing as you think necessary, press publish, and there you go – your post is up. Your views, opinions, thoughts, and insights are in the world. 

These may be all well and good, but they are not research findings. 

To access these, you need to go where those findings are – to articles in academic journals, essays in edited collections, and scholarly books. These have gone through peer review before publication: experts in the field have critiqued the work and it then appears in print because it has been deemed a contribution to knowledge: it asks a worthy question, has devised sound methods for answering, has collected relevant and sufficient data towards that answer, and has put forward an analysis that stands up to scrutiny. 

But does that mean that blog posts are permanently off-limits and have no place to play in a literature review? 

In this post (yes, I know – a blog post about using blog posts 😂), I am going to suggest -- 😱 Shock! Horror! 😱 -- that there may be circumstances where blogs, and similar things like sharing platform comments, can be useful in a literature review. We live in a world where the public domain has expanded to include both print and online material, and it can be useful to look at both. 

For anyone still gasping at this outrageous idea, you may be somewhat relieved by my hefty caveat: 

⚠️ Remember that blogs are blogs, not research articles, and so they must be treated as blogs. They can provide a slice of the public conversation on your topic if the popular view is useful to assess in your literature review, but they do not replace the research literature in your field. If you find yourself only reading and citing blogs, you haven’t really started yet. The bulk of your literature review should deal with the peer-reviewed published research in your field.

So, after you have dealt thoroughly with the research literature on your topic, when might it make sense to look at things like blogs and sharing platform comments? 

🟣 I drew on fan site comments in my analysis of Sheila Quigley’s regional crime fiction novel Bad Moon Rising. In that piece, it was useful to know not only what the research literature said about regional fiction, but also what reviewers and fans were saying about Bad Moon Rising in particular. For reviewers, I went to the news media. To find out what fans were saying, the place to go was fan sites, so that is where I went. I cited those comments specifically as fan comments, not research findings, and it was in addition to the research literature, not in place of it. 

🟣 I also drew on sharing platform comments in a systematised review of the way educational research deals with pop cultural depictions of teachers and teaching. In the world of systematic reviewing, there is a method called translation, which directs you to relate each finding from each study in your data set to all the others. In so doing, the idea is to come up with a conclusion about what they ultimately add up to. Translation, as I discovered when I consulted the peer-reviewed methodological literature on it, is notoriously mysterious. Each definition I read compounded the confusion. After establishing this in an analysis of the literature, I noted that the clearest definition turned up in a sharing platform comment. 

🟣 As a final example, let’s consider how academic blogging might be useful in a literature review. Increasingly, academics are encouraged to blog about their research, so we now have the published peer-reviewed research, blogs about the published peer-reviewed research, and any comments that might accumulate about that. After – and that is important – after you have tracked down and read the original peer-reviewed published research, an assessment of all those voices in relation to your take on the research might be useful. What did the original research actually say? What views on that research emerge in the research literature? How is the research presented on the blog? What views about it emerge in the public comments on the blog? Are those voices convergent or divergent? Is the idea circulating about what the original research said different from what it actually said? That might be an important question for your literature review. 

So there you have it. Blogs and such like can sometimes be useful in your literature review -- 

⚠️ If you have already tackled the body of peer-reviewed research in your field;

⚠️ If you treat them as the subjective opinion pieces they are; and

⚠️ If you deal with them critically. 

If anyone is interested in the publications I've mentioned, here are the references:

Mandala, S. 2012. 'Crime Fiction as Regional Fiction: An Analysis of Dialect and Point of View in Sheila Quigley's Bad Moon Rising'. Style 46 (2): 177-200. 

Mandala, S. 2023. 'Stylistics, Pop Culture, and Educational Research: A Systematized Review and Case Study'. English Text Construction 16 (2): 144-168.

 

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 professional success through more effective writing, thinking, and use of language. 

She specialises in dissertation literature review workshops 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

 🟢 Connect with her on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

What Kind of Writer Are You?

✍ In this blog, I typically focus on writing dissertation literature reviews. In today’s blog, however, I want to shift gears ⚙️ a bit and focus on you -- the dissertation literature review writer. 

What kind of writer are you? 

Whoa there, you might be thinking. Writers have ‘kinds’? 

Yes, it’s true – we don’t all write the same way. 🫨

🟣 Some people, as Sky Marsen outlines in her excellent book Professional Writing*, are bottom-up writers. We start by generating ideas, collecting information, and gathering data. This results in a massive pile of stuff 📚, which we then sift, sort, evaluate and eventually structure once we figure out our argument -- what we think all this stuff is ultimately saying. We are the types who tend to write the outline last. 

🟣 Other people are top-down writers. Top-down writers generate the outline of what they're writing first📋, and then attack their pile of stuff, slotting in the ideas, information, and data they've collected with the big picture view as a scaffold.

Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of us start with the pieces and figure out the picture as we go (bottom-up), others sketch out a picture first and then figure out the pieces (top-down). 🧩

If you have surmised by my use of 'we' and they' in these descriptions that I am a bottom-up writer, congratulations! 🥳 You are correct. ✅ There are, however, key things that bottom-up and top-down writers  have in common, particularly when it comes to writing dissertation literature reviews.  

✳️ All of us must collect and grapple with ideas, information, and data. Whichever kind of writer you are, this is an essential step.

✳️ All of us, whether we write the outline first or last, need to be sure that the headings in that outline are the steps in our argument and NOT a randomly ordered list of topics. The title of your outline should be your research question and the first line should be some version of My research question needs to be asked because . . . The headings should then be your main points, the patterns and trends you've identified in previous work that make your case (how you filled in three dots). The sub-headings should be the more granular evidence from previous studies that support those main points.

✳️ All of us will go through an iterative process. For those of us who start from the bottom and build up, we will create many interim structures before we settle on the finished one. As we go, one possible argument emerges, we set that out, have a re-think, and then re-structure it. Then we do more reading, which de-stabilises that structure, so we re-structure again to integrate the new information (re-re-structure?), and so on. For those of us who begin with an outline, we start slotting in the evidence, realise the outline has a missing step, re-jig the outline, slot in more evidence, notice that some of the evidence is actually better support for a different main point, re-re-jig the outline, and so on, until the final version -- the one that needs no more jigging, emerges. 

✳️ All of us should end up in the same place, with a rock-solid, well-argued case for why our research question needs to be asked. 

If we both eventually end up in the same place, why bother knowing which kind of writer we are? What are the advantages? 

➡️ A lot of the more generic guidance you'll encounter tends to assume there is only one kind of writer, and so only one way of writing. If you are the other kind of writer, this guidance may not make much sense to you or may give you the feeling that your way of writing is 'wrong', which of course it is not. If you know what kind of writer you are, you are in a better position to 'translate' the guidance and make it work for you. 

➡️ If you know about both strategies, you can experiment with both. You might find that at some stages of your drafting a bottom-up approach works best, perhaps at the very start. Once you've accounted for everything you've collected, you might find that the top-down strategy works best for later stages of your drafting. Alternatively, you might discover that you really work best with one strategy and stick with it. Either way, knowing about both strategies allows you to make an informed choice. 

By way of conclusion, I'll share a personal story. 🤗 I was once sitting on my floor, where I do most of my writing, happily sorting my pile of stuff into the first version of my argument. Someone happened by and asked what I thought I was doing wasting so much time and didn't I have anything better to do (😱). If you know what kind of writer you are, you can smile politely, thank such people for their advice, and carry on writing. 😉

* Marsen, S. 2013. Professional Writing. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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, thinking, and use of language. 

➡️ She specialises in dissertation literature review workshops 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 and email her from there: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

🟢 Connect on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290