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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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Can I Use Blog Posts in My Literature Review?

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 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 i...
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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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