Annotated Reading List

Here you will find an annotated list of sources I have encountered and found useful or thought provoking in some way, and my particular take on them.  The entries cover not only material on literature reviews, but material on related topics, such as drafting, the relationship between writing and thinking, and synthesizing more generally.  

Boote, D.N. and Beile, P. 2005. 'Scholars before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation'. Educational Researcher 34 (6): 3-15.

• This one is something of a classic in the literature on literature reviews -- if there is a paper on doing literature reviews after 2005, it will almost certainly cite Boote and Beile (2005).  The authors argue that even though the literature review is an essential part of what makes good research good, doctoral candidates rarely receive useful or explicit training in what literature reviews are for or how to actually write them. While the paper is not recent and the work it cites goes back to the 1980s, I found that much of their analysis matched my current experience of working with students and novice researchers on literature reviewing.

Key Quote: 'Doctoral students seeking advice on how to improve their literature reviews will find little published guidance worth heeding' (Boote and Beile 2005: 5).

Huff, R.K. 1983. 'Teaching Revision: A Model of the Drafting Process'. College English 45 (8): 800-816.

• An old one, but a good one and still my favorite account of what drafting actually entails.  The author offers a three-part model of drafting.  Phase one is the generative and relatively unmonitored phase, where we just get our ideas down on paper; phase two is the disciplined phase where we have to roll our sleeves up and come to grips with what we are writing and why it matters; and phase three is the final editing phase (dotting the i's and crossing the t's). The author also points out that these phases are not necessarily linear.  We may start with phase one and end with phase three, but the process is iterative, and we may spend a lot of time bouncing back and forth between phases one and two as we figure out what our argument actually is. Many of the issues I see in student work, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, stem from a tendency to generate ideas and then edit that draft, without going through phase two.  

Noblit, George, W. and Hare, R. Dwight. 1999. 'Chapter 5: Meta-ethnography: Synthesizing Qualitative Studies', in Counterpoints Vol. 44 Particularities: Collected Essays on Ethnography and Education. 93-123. Peter Lang. Noblit and Hare's original book-length account was published in 1988.

• Strictly speaking, this one is not about dissertation literature reviews but about full systematic reviews, studies that use a body of previous studies as evidence in order to answer a research question.  An issue that emerges in qualitative systematic reviews is how the findings from a body of qualitative studies, which can be very divergent in terms of design and methods, can be brought together and meaningfully synthesized in order to answer the research question.  In this chapter, Noblit and Hare set out their 7-stage process for doing this.  They call it a 'meta-ethnography' because they were most interested in how primary ethnographic studies could be synthesized in a qualitative systematic review.  Originally published in 1988, it is still to this day (as I write this in 2023), one of the most commonly used methods of synthesizing evidence in qualitative systematic reviews.  What I like best about this work, and why I list it here, is that this ground-breaking method emerged out of a failure.  The authors were involved in an earlier project to synthesize a number of studies that had been commissioned to look at the experience of desegregation in urban American schools.  When the project was evaluated, however, it was concluded that it had failed: little of use in terms of new insight was deemed to have emerged in the synthesis of the primary studies.  From this failure, however, Noblit and Hare developed one of the most influential methods in qualitative evidence synthesis.  That is something to think about the next time you experience a failure, or something that doesn't go quite the way you thought it would. Interestingly, while there are many iterations of Noblit and Hare's 7 step-process, none (that I have read, at any rate), mention its genesis from failure.  For this nugget of wisdom, you have to go back to the original source.     

Key Quote: 'The failure to achieve an adequate synthesis for the desegregation ethnographies was, of course, disheartening to all involved.  As scholars, we initially took it as a personal failure.  However, if we make the effort to learn from failure, knowledge advances as much through failure as through success' (Noblit and Hare 1999: 106).

Nowell, L.S., Norris, J.M., White, D.E., and Moules, N.J. 2017. 'Thematic Analysis: Striving to Meet the Trustworthiness Criteria'. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. 16: 1-13.

• This paper is not about literature reviews or about academic writing. It is, however, an excellent account of thematic coding, one that actually gives you a good idea of how to roll up your sleeves and get started. As I note in my July 22nd blog, thematic coding can be usefully applied when you are trying to turn your randomly ordered and unruly reading notes into a review of the literature in your field that motivates your research question. 

Key Quote: 'Qualitative coding is a process of reflection and a way of interacting with and thinking about data' (Nowell et al. 2017: 5).

van Ockenburg, L., van Weijen, D., and Rijlaarsdam, G. 2019. 'Learning to Write Synthesis Texts: A Review of Intervention Studies.' Journal of Writing Research. 10 (3): 402-428.

• This one is a systematic review study of interventions testing how best to teach the skill of writing synthesis texts.  It covers younger age groups and does not deal centrally with the dissertation literation review per se.  However, the authors do deal in some depth with the often mysterious skill of synthesis, a core requirement for writing a thorough and well-argued review.

Key Quote: 'In education, students often focus on the final product and pay insufficient attention to the complex, recursive processes that are necessary for creating a good synthesis' (van Ockenburg et al. 2019: 418).