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But Does My Literature Review Sound Clever Enough?

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✍This is a common worry, and a particularly pernicious one. You’ve just got absorbed into your work, you’re feeling motivated, you’ve started noticing interesting connections between sources, and then 💥BAM!💥 Am I doing it right? All the papers I read sound so clever! I don’t sound like that! How can I ever establish myself as an expert with this mess?!  Fear and doubt rear their ugly heads and then paralysis sets in. You’d set aside the whole morning to get some real work done, but now? Impossible. Your pen falters on the page and it feels like there's a weight crushing down on you. 🤫 I’m going to let you in on a secret.  All those papers you are reading 📚 -- the ones that sound so clever, the ones by the biggest and most established names in your field -- they all began as sloppy, messy drafts, every single one of them. And that is because drafts are supposed to be sloppy and messy. That’s their job.  ➡️ No one’s draft sounds clever.  That’s all very well for a ...
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Your Literature Review Is An Argument

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As you are preparing to do your literature review, you might be reading up on them.  Most research methodology textbooks have a chapter or two on the literature review, as do the many guides you can find on writing your dissertation or thesis project.  Such texts can be useful in many ways, and when it comes to the literature review they will typically tell you a host of things.  The literature review is where you demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of your field.  The literature review is where you critically appraise prior research relevant to your topic. The literature review is where you identify common themes, patterns, and issues in the existing body of research.  The literature review is where you assess previous findings in relation to methodological strengths and weaknesses.  The literature review is where you define what has been done in your field and delineate what has not been done. A good literature review will do all of these things.  Howe...
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Can I Use an AI to Summarise Research Papers for Me?

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😞 This blog begins with a big sigh because, yes, these days, you can now use an AI to summarise papers for you.  ➡️ But should you? That is another question entirely.  You’ll make your own decision on this one as the glorious, sovereign individual you are. 😊 ⚠️ But speaking for myself, my decision on this one is a very firm NO and in this blog I outline three reasons why.  📚 If you get an AI to summarise a paper for you, you are not reading it for yourself. It doesn’t matter how good the summary is, or how thorough, or how shiny the new AI is.  If you yourself don’t read the original, you can’t really know what it said.  You remain ignorant of the paper’s actual premises and claims because you don’t have any real knowledge -- you only have what Shane Parrish (2023: 165)* calls the ‘illusion of knowledge’. Your job in your literature review is to evaluate previous work to make the case for why your research question should be asked, and you can’t make any goo...
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