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

 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...

🔸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 ...

  This is a question I often get from my students, perhaps because they  have heard things like  Your literature review has to be up-to-date  or  You have to know what is current on your topic.  While both of these things are true, it does not follow that you should as a matter of course exclude older sources in your field.  While this is one to discuss with your supervisor, in general terms my view is that there is no reason to ignore older sources just because they are old, and there can be many good reasons to include them.  You can be up-to-date and deal with older sources.  As the author of the literature review, you decide what gets covered and what doesn't, and that decision should be made on the basis of what the source in your hand contributes to the synthesis you are writing, not on some arbitrary cut-off date for publication. In any field, there will be the pioneering papers, the game-changing books, the edited collections from the...