Literature reviews - harder than they look

Wherever you are and whatever you are studying - if you are doing a postgraduate degree you will almost certainly have one thing in common with postgraduates all over the world - you are going to write a literature review at some point.

Now, if you are like me this won't be causing you any concern at all right now, because I was absolutely convinced that I knew what I was doing when it came to my literature review. I had read a lot of papers, talked to a lot of people and had an enormous pile of print-outs sitting on my desk just waiting to be condensed into a succinct and critical appraisal of my subject area.

Now picture the scene, after 3 years of tireless struggle against the laws of nature, pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge and endeavour (and drinking a lot of tea along the way) I was ready to start writing. I had a hypothesis that was tested, I had conclusions, I even had the rarest of experimental outcomes - results! It was time to write-up.

Naturally I began with the literature review, reasoning that it would be good for me to refresh myself of all of the knowledge in that pile and get me in the mood for proper academic writing. I even found my first year literature review to get me started, but soon decided that it wasn't very good because my ideas had changed so much. Not to be deterred - I would start again.

Now I wish I could say that I wrote happily ever after - but that would be lying. What did happen was that after skimming through more than a hundred papers and sorting them into ever smaller piles and themes I was utterly confused. How could anybody sort this mess into a succinct and critical appraisal. There were disagreements, conflicts, outright mistakes. How much detail did I put in? What should be put into footnotes? What sub-headings would make the most sense?

It had all seemed so easy when I had been reading the theses of those postgraduates who had come before me - standing now like giants among mere mortals like me. Their literature reviews had been like Pulitzer prize winning books - hard to put down - how could I compete?

Herein lies the purpose of this post and in case you hadn't already guessed from the title, literature reviews are very difficult to write well. My overconfidence and the assumption that it would be the 'easy' part of my thesis was wrong. In fact the easiest part of my thesis was the results and conclusions since they were entirely my own and I was the world expert on them. In comparison, trying to assimilate and summarise the work of hundreds of others was tough.

So what would I do differently?
Obviously I did write a literature review in the end and there are many, many articles on the web that will give you hints on how to do so and I don't intend to reproduce those here. However, I will offer up 3 pieces of advice that I learned the hard way that would have made the literature review much easier for me.

1. Write continuously - make time once a month or once a fortnight (whatever suits you) to type up some notes on papers or books you have read. Getting typed up notes that can be cut, pasted and reorganised later is better than lots of handwritten notes that tend to get lost.


2. Write a lot - Don't be afraid to take too many notes. If you are typing them up then don't waste time agonising over what are the most important points to keep. It's better to have too much detail and then cut it down.


3. Write the literature review in 3 stages. Start with a first draft that gets all of the detail down as though it will be a standalone chapter. Don't worry too much about setting the scene for your own work.
   
   After this write up your results, conclusions etc. Then revisit the literature review and modify it to set the scene for your work, e.g. raising questions that you will refer back to later etc.
   
   Now go and work on the rest of thesis again. Make sure it all hangs together and then, finally, revisit the literature review one more time. By now you will have firm conclusions and opinions that your thesis can justify. Time to get critical. Make sure that instead of just stating what others have done and asking questions, critique what they have done. State if you have doubts and be authoritative. This is where the review becomes interesting and where you stamp your personality on it.

Your literature review sets the tone of your thesis. It should not be a boring list of other people's work. It should be a justifiable critique of that work that asks the questions you intend to answer.

Tags: Literature Review, PhD, Masters

Dan Colegate on 20 Oct 08:53 0 comments