Literature Reviews: A Blog for the Exasperated from Writing Works Consulting

  You slave over a draft. Months of work. Endless agonising. Finally, it’s ready. You press ‘Save’ one last time and send it off. Your job now is waiting for the feedback. And yes, you know the process is meant to be helpful and that your draft won’t be perfect and that you’re on a learning journey, and all that.   But it’s still a punch in the stomach when it comes, no matter how well prepared you thought were. Needs development here . Too descriptive. Not enough critical evaluation.   Link studies together. Don’t summarise, synthesise .   You sink into your chair and randomly thumb the pages. Needs development? Link the studies? Synthesise? What do these things even mean?! And Not enough critical engagement ?! You spent more time doing that than anything else! How could there not be enough?!   Your first instinct is to fling the whole thing in the bin and take up flower arranging. A wonderful occupation, no doubt, but is that really your drea...

Mind maps promise a great deal. Organise your thoughts! Find connections! Make structure fun! And it’s true. It can be fun. We can spend many happy hours putting our ideas into colourful bubble shapes and connecting them with lines.  It feels like progress. But is it? Let’s say you’re doing a study on mindfulness practices and productivity at work. In a typical mind map, the main topic would be in a big circle at the centre, maybe ‘Mindfulness at Work’.  Radiating out from this central point towards the corners and edges of the page would be related themes, each in a smaller circle, such as productivity, stress reduction, organisational culture, focus , and criticisms . And each of these sub-themes would generate even smaller topic bubbles based on what the papers in each cluster tended to cover. Stress reduction, for example, might have bubbles representing papers on burn-out reduction, emotional regulation , and improved moods .  Circles, Lines, and Dead Ends   You...

Order your review chronologically . You’ve probably come across this idea before – or maybe toyed with it yourself, especially if you’re sitting on a massive pile of notes and wondering what to do next. You know you have to corral it all somehow, give it some sort of structure, turn it into a chapter or section worth someone’s time to read. But how?  The Temptation This is when the chronological temptation starts creeping in. Every finding has a year on it. The years can be grouped together. Look, I can start right now – there’s a cluster from 2015 . . .  It feels like you are doing something. If feels like you are bringing order to chaos. It feels like you are finally making progress and sorting it all out.  Beware of those feelings.  The Reality There are many ways to bring order to chaos. You could organise findings alphabetically by the surnames of their authors. Or you could group findings by the different journals they appear in. Or according to the order you ...

How Do You Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising?  This is an excellent question. And a very fair one. Research textbooks, advisors, the handy checklists and self-study videos – all of them will tell you that a literature review must synthesise previous sources, not summarise them.  Fine. But how do you do that? Advice on this is harder to find, leaving many of us tearing our hair out in frustration. I know that’s how I felt, back when I was surrounded by piles of papers and stacks of notes and wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing with it all.  That’s why I’m dedicating this blog, the first of 2026, to the how in how to stop summarising and start synthesising.  But First, Some Preliminaries Summarising is what happens if you describe individual studies one at a time ( this study said this; that study showed that ). This doesn’t put anything new in the world – it only reports on information that already exists. Synthesis, in contrast, is all about f...

🔸Do a critical appraisal🔸 If you are a research student, you'll run into an assignment like this one sooner or later. But what is it really asking you to do? 🤔 The guidebooks will offer you clear, crisp definitions of what a critical appraisal is , like this one:  ❝The use of explicit, transparent methods to assess the data in published research, by systematically considering such factors as validity, adherence to reporting standards, methods, conclusion and generalisability❞ (from Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review , pg. 304). Excellent! Now you know that you need to be explicit , transparent , and systematic . You need to assess the data in the research that has been published in your field. And there are any number of checklists 📋 you can consult that will help you zero in on what to look for ( Are the conclusions warranted by the data? Does the analysis stand up? Does the study measure what it says it will measure? Have the methods been robustly just...

Your literature review should cover the relevant literature.  Well of course it should. This is a piece of advice you’ll often find in textbooks on doing dissertations. It seems so obvious that it is easy to skim over it. Cover the relevant literature. Right. Go it. And how hard could it be? That article is relevant, that one isn’t, job done.  Or is it? 😕 Like many things you’ll discover as you do your literature review, deciding what is relevant turns out to be surprisingly complex. There is more here to think about than you might have first supposed, and that is what this blog is about.  In some cases, you will indeed find that one source is clearly relevant and another clearly isn’t. In many other cases, however, there are at least two intermediate categories between relevant and not relevant: ✅  don’t know yet,  and  ✅  marginally relevant .  We’ll deal with each one in turn.  There will be times, especially in the early stages of your ...

 It is that time of year again. 🎄🎉 We are frantically getting those last things done, running around buying presents 🎁, writing cards, and doing all the other things we do to prepare for the holiday season. If, in amongst all that you are also one of those brave people writing a dissertation 📚, you might also be setting aside some precious undistracted time to work on your literature review. In honour of the season, I wanted to share with you my 12 most successful mistakes. Yes, you read that correctly  -- successful mistakes. Doing anything for the first time involves some stumbling around, and I certainly did my share of that. It was when I fell down and got back up that I learned the most, and in this blog that is what I want to share with you.  So, here it is -- my 12 most productive mistakes from 30 years of writing literature reviews and what they taught me. 1. Not understanding the role of description. If you read my blog regularly, you'll know your literature ...

 I am sometimes startled by the myths and misunderstandings that I find circulating about the literature review, so today’s blog is the first in a semi-regular series on busting these myths 💪 or, at the very least, unpicking them to get at some useful truths. To get us started, have a think about this claim, which pops up with annoying regularity: The literature review is all about other people’s work, so it won’t be original.  True or false? 🤔 The sharp-eyed amongst you will already have noticed that there are two claims here -- bad practice for a true-or-false item, to be sure, but a good place to begin our discussion. Let’s take each claim in turn.  The literature review is all about other people’s work. Is it? In one sense, this is true. The main purpose of a literature review is to analyse the body of previous work in a field to establish why a research question needs to be asked. So, yes -- a literature review in this narrow sense deals with other people’s resear...

It is that time of year again. August has drawn to a close and we are now into September. The shops have their school stationary front and centre – pens of all kinds, piles of printer paper, shiny new notebooks in all manner of designs, just waiting for your brilliant ideas. Ah, yes – the start of the academic year.  If you’re an MA student or a doctoral candidate, these golden days on the cusp of autumn may find you embarking on your dissertation, which typically starts with your literature review. What’s out there on your topic? What do we already know, or think we know? What is the lay of the land in your subject? As the autumn sunshine streams through your window, you’ll be digging into a stack of research articles and filling up one of your shiny new notebooks or its electronic equivalent.  So what do you do with all this material you are collecting – all the findings, all the quotes, all the conclusions, and all the thoughts you have about these things? How do you turn t...

 Well, yes and no. It depends on what you mean by 'model'.  If you were looking for some sort of proforma into which you could just plug your text, that might appeal in the short term but, like most short cuts when it comes to deep and complex writing, it won't be helpful and in the long run it will only waste time. There are at least two reasons why this is:  1) Your literature review is yours. It makes the case for why your research question should be asked. This means that what you find in the literature as you set about building this case will be different to what anyone else finds -- they are researching their topic, not yours. And the argument you eventually construct as you grapple with your review will be based on what you find and, more importantly, what you make of what you find. Since neither of these things is predictable, neither of them can be reduced to any particular, one-size-fits all proforma.  2) Your literature review is not just a 'review'. In ...

Yes. There is no way around it.  As Boote and Beile (2005) point out in their article Scholars before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation , the literature review can sometimes get short shrift in comparison to other elements of research that can seem more exciting or more significant, such as the findings. But without the literature review, your research can't really stand as a contribution to knowledge in your field.  If you haven't established why your research question needs to be asked, then what you did to answer it and the answers you ultimately got will come across as shallow and uninformed, little more than I wanted to know about A, so I did B, and found C. That will do if you are researching what phone to buy, but it won't be good enough for academic research.  Without a literature review to establish why your question is necessary, your answer will lose much of its potential power.  And if you have n...