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

I came across an interesting example of a literature review the other day and thought it was worth sharing. The review was in a paper by Glowacki and colleagues (2020)*, who were reporting on a study to see if a series of grant writing workshops run with academic staff had actually increased the number of successful grant applications.  What caught my eye was that the review was systematised . So what is that and why is it important if you are grappling with a literature review, or helping someone else grapple with one?  To answer that, I need to back up a few steps and explain  systematic review studies .  If you are doing a qualitative systematic review study, or its quantitative counterpart, a meta-analysis, you are essentially doing a study of studies.  That is, you have a research question you want to answer, but instead of interviewing people or running an experiment or analysing a corpus of newspaper articles (or social media posts or whatever), you locat...

When you sit down to start your literature review and come to the realization that you have no idea what to do, there are any number of guidebooks out there you could consult. But how helpful are they? I recently started thinking about this when I happened to pull my copy of Phillips & Pugh's How to Get a Phd*  off my book shelf.  I smiled to myself as I dusted it off and thumbed through the pages, catching sight of the notes I'd written in the margin. But what IS my position?! I had scrawled urgently on one page. 'Researchers examine data critically' I had emphatically underlined on another (48). In many ways this was a useful book. It had a wealth of information on the nature of a PhD, what it was and wasn't; about the postgraduate and PhD system in the UK; about the supervision process; about the nature of research; and so on.  Another thing I remembered, however, was how confused I was about that thing called  the literature review . I do not blame Phillips...

 Some years ago, I was the examiner at a mock viva.  The PhD had many strengths and the student, earnest and hard-working, was very clearly knowledgeable and had a good grasp of methodology and methods.  I was therefore struck by how little analysis there was in the literature review.  I read it several times in advance of the viva, seeking to be generous, but there was no escaping the conclusion: the literature review had not done its job. It was not an argument that established why the research question needed to be asked but a series of randomly ordered encyclopedia entries on topics that related, in greater or lesser degrees, to the student's subject.  My recommendation would be that there was still another 3-6 months of work to do in order to redeem the literature review.  The other reviewer picked up on the same issue, and I have always remembered her comments: Where are you in this literature review? Where is your critical voice?  That got me to...

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 ...