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