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

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 ...

 My students taught me something the other day. Paraphrasing can mean two different things. There's an easy version, and a hard version and -- you guessed it -- the easy version is what you might be most familiar with, but it is the hard version that you need for your literature review. The easy version is when you take a quote, change some of the key words (perhaps with a trusty thesaurus), maybe alter the sentence structure a bit, and Voila! The quote is now in your own words, you give the author attribution, and you're good to go.   But are you? Notice that in the easy version, you don't really have to fully understand the quote, or how it might or might not be evidence for why your research question needs to be asked. You could even do this by picking a quote at random from any source.  Paraphrasing this way is mostly a surface operation -- you don't have to think very hard about it. And why are you paraphrasing this way? Is it because you feel you have too many...

Now here is a topic that is more interesting than you might at first think. In any literature review, you'll be citing sources and quoting from them so, you pick the most relevant quotes and, well, quote them. What more is there to say? Quite a bit, as it happens.  In some undergraduate work, the purpose is to determine your stance on a text or issue, and then to present evidence for that stance.  That evidence often comes from the literature and in many cases, the task goes like this: you dig in, do loads of reading, find work that supports your stance, pick the clearest or juiciest quotes, and cite them in support of your view.  This work is not without value. You get practice in working out a clear stance, you get experience in searching for scholarly sources, and in reading them. You gain experience in working out how your work fits with previous work. Who agrees with you? Who does not? In order to answer these questions, you have to have a clear and robust sense of y...

 Have a dissertation deadline looming? Still wrestling with your literature review chapter? Or just generally stuck on what to do with that pile of notes and papers? Here are my top five tips for you, just in time for the start of 2024.  1. Remember that your literature review is an argument . You are not describing the articles you read to show what you know.  You show what you know by using the findings, conclusions, and insights from previous work in your field as evidence in an argument that establishes why your research question should be asked. 2. Approach your literature review like an explorer.  Think of previous work in your field as the unknown terrain you have to make sense of. Invest time in the card-sorting technique up front as you venture into this terrain to save time later. Convert your notes into cards, with one thought, sentence, quote, finding, etc. per card, and then begin sorting. 3. As you sort, say to yourself, 'My research question needs to b...

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 ...

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...