Welcome

Welcome to Literature Reviews: A Blog for the Exasperated  

Are you sitting with a pile of reading notes trying to figure out what to do next? Perhaps you are an MA or PhD student quietly wondering what the literature review is even for? Or maybe you are an author wading through the anonymous comments on your manuscript, pondering how to address something like literature review underdeveloped? Or maybe you are a faculty member with responsibility for research students, frustrated with the published advice and looking for ideas on how to help your students write better literature reviews. If any of these apply, then this blog is for you, and for anyone else who has struggled in the dark with the complex and mysterious task of synthesizing a body of research for a literature review. In this blog, I aim to de-mystify this process for all of us so that we can write more effective reviews, help our students to write more effective reviews, and rescue what I fear may be a dying art.

On this blog, I will be posting on all aspects of literature reviews -- what they are, how you go from notes to a review, what a good review looks like, what characterizes poor reviews, teaching ideas, featured papers, my own experiences with literature reviewing and what they taught me, and much more. Posts are tagged so that you can pull them up by subject areas, or you can just browse through them, whichever you find most useful. You'll also find an annotated bibliography of sources I have found helpful over the years, a link list to other blogs that might interest you if you like this one, and inspirational quotes to lift our spirits. While I aim to cover a number of disciplines, my territory is primarily the humanities, education, and social sciences, so there won't be much here on the hard sciences.

To start, you might want to have a look at what I mean by literature review for the purposes of this blog, and if you want to know more about me, the link to my profile is here. Please do contact me with any ideas or questions you have, or with feedback on what you want to see more of (or less of) -- I would love to hear from you! 

Enjoy!

Susan