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

In a recent post, I noted that annotated bibliographies are not the same as literature reviews.  An annotated bibliography is a list that describes each source you've read while a literature review is an argument that uses previous work in your field as evidence to establish why your research question needs to be asked.   But does that mean you shouldn't do an annotated bibliography? Actually, no -- you should.  Annotated bibliographies and other kinds of lists are an important tool you can use while you are drafting your literature review.   Few people (at least amongst my students and mentees over the years) seem to realize this -- my suggestions to make and analyze lists in order to get a literature review off the ground often come as a bit of a surprise.  I think that is because lists are widely misunderstood. When we think of lists, we tend think of everyday ephemera -- the shopping list on the back of an envelope, the to-do lists on a scatter of ...

  No.  It really, really isn't.  An annotated bibliography is an alphabetized list of all the sources you have read with a short summary given for each one.  It might take a long time and a lot of work to do your annotated bibliography.  You have to read all the sources, figure out what they say, and then summarize that in reasonable prose.  But this does not take much critical thinking and it does not require you to do anything original, which is why you will get comments like 'needs development' or 'not a literature review' or 'no critical voice here' if you just convert your annotated bibliography into paragraph form and think you are done. In an annotated bibliography, you don't have to analyze what each source said and come to any sort of view about how the findings and conclusions from each source relate to each other and to your particular research question.  Neither does an annotated bibliography require you to formulate and structure an argume...

This is another question I often get, and it is a good one.  Gone are the days when you could locate all of the studies in your field and go through them as an individual. You could probably spend the rest of your life searching and reading and never be done. So knowing when you have read enough studies is one of many decisions you need to make as the author of your review.  So how do you make it? There are two things you need to consider when you are deciding if your literature review is done.  As I have noted in a previous post , your literature review is an argument in which you make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. So have you made your case?  Do you take the reader, step by step, through the patterns and trends you have discerned in the body of work on your topic, establishing how these patterns and trends add up to the need to ask your research question? Have you instanced each of these patterns and trends with findings from the studi...

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, ...

  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...

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...