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

😞 This blog begins with a big sigh because, yes, these days, you can now use an AI to summarise papers for you.  ➡️ But should you? That is another question entirely.  You’ll make your own decision on this one as the glorious, sovereign individual you are. 😊 ⚠️ But speaking for myself, my decision on this one is a very firm NO and in this blog I outline three reasons why.  📚 If you get an AI to summarise a paper for you, you are not reading it for yourself. It doesn’t matter how good the summary is, or how thorough, or how shiny the new AI is.  If you yourself don’t read the original, you can’t really know what it said.  You remain ignorant of the paper’s actual premises and claims because you don’t have any real knowledge -- you only have what Shane Parrish (2023: 165)* calls the ‘illusion of knowledge’. Your job in your literature review is to evaluate previous work to make the case for why your research question should be asked, and you can’t make any goo...

 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...

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 ...

 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 ...

Doing your literature review can be a real slog. Believe me, I know.  I like doing literature reviews and even I think it is a bit of a trudge sometimes.  But if you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that it simply must done -- there are no short cuts. You have to come to grips with the body of work that precedes your research. And that means reading many, many papers in order to make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. And, annoyingly, you will have to read papers that in the end turn out to be irrelevant. How else to know if they are relevant or not? Yes, a pain, I grant you.   But can you have fun along the way, too? That is what I dare to suggest in today’s blog.   If you read literature reviews for long enough, you begin to see certain patterns in the way they are structured and written,    For example, many reviews begin, or state somewhere near their start, some version of  There have been many studies of ...

Data can be confusing when it comes to your literature review.  Does your literature review have data? Do you deal with data when you are writing it? If your literature review has to be an analysis rather than a description -- which it does -- what are you analyzing, exactly?  Today's blog is about these questions. First, though, let's offer a definition of data.  Data , in a broad sense, is any information we collect systematically to answer a question.  In research, we usually think of data as the stuff we deal with in our analysis and results chapters.  That is, data is what we have elicited from our participants, be they texts or people, to answer our research question. This is sometimes called our primary data and it is of course crucial and essential.  But collecting and analyzing data also applies when you are doing your literature review. While we tend to think of literature reviews as a very long exercise in reading, you are doing much more than ...

An exercise I often use with my students is to reverse engineer a literature review to work out how they are put together.  This helps to get students thinking about what authors actually have to do in order to turn reading notes into a review.  The analogy here is with creative writing: if you were a novice creative writer and you wanted to work out how to write great characters, you would not just read novels with great characters but study them carefully to see how the authors of those works created them. So as novice literature reviewers , I tell my students, train yourselves to learn from more experienced writers .  As I guide my students through this process so that they can eventually do it more independently, one text I often use for this purpose is an article on English in multilingual advertising by An H. Kuppens (2010), which I have on my list of favorite reviews . Using the following short quote from the Introduction, I ask my students to speculate about what ...

 No, seriously, it is.  Stay with me on this one for a bit, whether you are writing a literature view or teaching others how to write them.  You can think of reading notes as 'data' you have collected on an 'unknown culture' (the literature in your field).  Think of yourself as an ethnographer or anthropologist.  You have been a 'participant observer' in this culture (spending hours and hours in the library or on-line), 'talking' with the 'members' of this culture (reading and thinking about the articles, essays, and books) and seeking to inhabit their point of view by finding out what they say and why they say it (taking notes on the findings, methods, and methodological stances in previous research).  You've been asking questions about what they tell you (interrogating these findings, speculating about why, ultimately, they matter), and you have started to trace some connections and contrasts in what all the 'members' say; that is, ...