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

  A Blog for the New Academic Year 2025-2026 It can easily happen when we’re new to this whole business of enquiry. Maybe you’re a PhD candidate or a professional moving from practice into research. You’re committed, passionate about your subject, and excited about making a contribution to knowledge. You’ve got a rock-star question and an outline of your methods. But you've hit a snag. Your literature review.  You have a gigantic pile of studies stacked around your desk -- or a file full to bursting on your computer, depending on how you prefer to do these things. You’ve done the recommended reading in the how-to books, sat through the self-study tutorials, and followed the easy-step guides. It’s still not entirely clear from all this what you are expected to do, exactly, but you give it your best shot.  "You love your research. You can’t wait to dig in. But you’ve hit a snag. Your literature review." You sink months into a draft -- frustrating, hair-tearing, pen-chewing ...

😞 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...

✍This is a common worry, and a particularly pernicious one. You’ve just got absorbed into your work, you’re feeling motivated, you’ve started noticing interesting connections between sources, and then 💥BAM!💥 Am I doing it right? All the papers I read sound so clever! I don’t sound like that! How can I ever establish myself as an expert with this mess?!  Fear and doubt rear their ugly heads and then paralysis sets in. You’d set aside the whole morning to get some real work done, but now? Impossible. Your pen falters on the page and it feels like there's a weight crushing down on you. 🤫 I’m going to let you in on a secret.  All those papers you are reading 📚 -- the ones that sound so clever, the ones by the biggest and most established names in your field -- they all began as sloppy, messy drafts, every single one of them. And that is because drafts are supposed to be sloppy and messy. That’s their job.  ➡️ No one’s draft sounds clever.  That’s all very well for a ...

 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...

✍ In this blog, I typically focus on writing dissertation literature reviews. In today’s blog, however, I want to shift gears ⚙️ a bit and focus on you -- the dissertation literature review writer.   What kind of writer are you?  Whoa there , you might be thinking. Writers have ‘kinds’?   Yes, it’s true – we don’t all write the same way. 🫨 🟣 Some people, as Sky Marsen outlines in her excellent book Professional Writing* , are bottom-up writers. We start by generating ideas, collecting information, and gathering data. This results in a massive pile of stuff 📚, which we then sift, sort, evaluate and eventually structure once we figure out our argument -- what we think all this stuff is ultimately saying. We are the types who tend to write the outline last.  🟣 Other people are top-down writers. Top-down writers generate the outline of what they're writing first📋, and then attack their pile of stuff, slotting in the ideas, information, and data they've collected wit...

🔸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 ...