Theses and dissertations

About literature reviews

Literature reviews are usually an early part of a research document, such as a dissertation, thesis, or article for a research journal.

The literature review has two main purposes. First, it gives an up to date picture of current research and thinking relevant to your topic and a fair evaluation of the main ideas. This helps to ensure that your research builds on current research and that your research does not unnecessarily repeat work that has already been done. Second, it should justify your core research question and any sub-questions you have. All relevant aspects of the research question should normally appear in the literature review.

Don't treat it as an unhelpful, onerous chore. First, ask questions and look for answers in order to learn something new about your topic. You might even change your views completely. Second, careful treatment of the details is part of being thorough; learning to do so is part of the degree requirements. Third, the better you perceive the current state of knowledge on the topic, the better your research can be.

Why?

The literature review represents the current state of knowledge on the topic. It benefits you in many other ways:

1. Your research will add to existing knowledge, not just repeat what has been done before.
2. It gives context to your research.
3. It normally means that you start your research with a level of sophistication that would not otherwise be possible.
4. A literature review is often the place to clarify definitions that are already in use, especially if they are vague or disputed. You might achieve better definitions of key concepts and terms, especially if existing definitions need to be modified for your specific purposes.
5. It establishes your expertise on your particular topic.
6. It establishes the theoretical framework.
7. You can identify major areas of debate.
8. You can identify gaps in current research.
9. You can evaluate assumptions and filter out poor assumptions.
10. You can identify the most influential people.
11. You can avoid making past mistakes.
12. You can avoid unproductive lines of research (i.e., blind alleys).
13. You get input and insights from writers who have looked at that kind of topic and thought about it in ways that you would not have or in contexts unfamiliar to you.
14. You might get ideas for better methodology.

Literature reviews also have another benefit for the beginning researcher. They show that the writer can learn a new topic by oneself with minimal help or supervision.

(By the way, literature reviews are also good assignments by themselves. If you have been given the task of writing a literature review as an undergraduate essay, it will most likely be specified as an essay of between 1,500 words and 2,500 words, but the number of items probably won’t be specified.)

Before you start

Find three or four dissertations on topics similar to yours. The literature reviews are easy to find because they are put in a separate chapter in most dissertations. (Look near the front; it's usually about chapter 2 or 3.) Many journal articles also contain literature reviews.

• They will probably show you what they should look like when finished. Don't feel overwhelmed if they are quite long and look perfect. They are finished products, and you won't immediately see how they were written.
• Look through them to locate the major recurring themes. Look at the way they grouped items based on major themes, included the minor themes, and arranged everything in a readable order.
• The outline will give you some good ideas on how they can be structured, and might give you ideas of section headings that you could use.
• They might indicate some of the keywords for your literature searches.
• While you're looking through dissertations, look though the bibliographies for references to recent publications that are relevant to your topic, and look at the methodology chapters for ideas for your methodology.

Different kinds of sources

Different kinds of sources have different levels of value in research:

• Primary sources are materials that contain the thoughts of people as they originally thought them. That is, they are in the original form before a translator, reviewer, commentator, or editor interpreted them. In your literature review, use primary sources wherever possible. They include:
• Published sources such as journal articles, monographs, conference proceedings, and books of research articles.
• Unpublished sources include original minutes of meetings, letters, reports, diaries, official records, archives, conference proceedings, etc.
• Fieldwork records include observation notes, questionnaire answers, interview notes, etc.
• Research dissertations, and theses.
• Secondary sources are materials that contain the thoughts of primary sources in a form interpreted by a translator, reviewer, commentator, or editor. In your literature review, use these if necessary, which usually means when primary sources are not available.
• Tertiary sources are explanatory sources, such as textbooks and popular reading. In your final literature review, use them only when unavoidable and if your supervisor permits.
• Mixed sources are explanatory sources in which the author has interpolated original thought and critique. This is most likely when researchers write specialized textbooks. Check with your supervisor.

Using journal articles

There are two main kinds of journals:

1. Articles in research journals are usually very specialized and have narrow topics. They normally add to theory in their field. If they are experimental in some way, they have particular methodologies and tightly defined populations. The approach is based on the shared belief that theory develops through a large amount of specialized research items. These can then be reviewed to create more generalized conclusions.
   Research journals occasionally include "how to" articles, often relating to methodology, which are useful as textbooks.
2. Articles in professional journals are often less specialized, and are primarily used to consider implementational issues and improvement of practice.

Journal articles are often relatively short, and they can be quite recent because they take less time to be published than books. The best journals are all referreed, that is, independent reviewers have approved them before publication.

One kind of article is the research article, which are usually from 4,000-6,000 words and are narrowly focussed on a particular topic. They usually have very specialized relevance, so many articles in the same field will not be relevant to your particular research topic. The other kind of article is the book review; reviewers write short articles reviewing new books published in the specialized field of the journal.

What should be in the annotated bibliography?

For serious research, especially at doctoral level, it should include mainly doctoral dissertations and peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last three to five years. Some monographs are significant enough to be essential, even if they are older. Masters theses are permitted, but most of them are not as useful.

Besides journal articles, you can use many other kinds of sources. You can use books that are primary or secondary sources (called monographs). They are seldom completely up to date because they take so long to get to print but their thought is normally very well developed. In the same way, you can also use chapters of large books, anthology articles, and (sometimes) Internet sources. In most cases, you’ll be looking at the works of individuals, but you can also study leading figures and major movements in the field. Unpublished sources are also permissible.

You don't need to include only include original research items. You can also include critiques of research because they contribute to the current state of knowledge on the topic.

While many of your sources will be books and journal articles, you can also use chapters of large books, anthology articles, dissertations, and Internet sources. (Try to use a range of sources, and not just the Internet.) In most cases, you’ll be looking at the works of individuals, but you can also study leading figures and major movements in the field.

Your literature review should normally include the theory and concepts behind the topic, including critiques. It should also include empirical literature. This is research done in the real (or simulated) world that has produced concrete evidence related to the topic. 2

After that, supervisors have different views, such as:

1. Some supervisors are only interested in research articles.
2. Some supervisors suggest that a good rule of thumb is to aim to cover fifty works, approximately half being dissertations from the last five years, and half research articles from the last five years. (It's only a rough guide, because it omits monographs, which take time to get to publication but give more comprehensive treatments of their subjects.) After that, ask your supervisor.
3. It can depend on how much has been written, when it was written, and the size and complexity of the topic. If a lot has been written recently, you might need to ask your supervisor whether you should narrow the topic.
4. “How far should I go back?” Some schools don't permit students to include anything older than five years. It depends on the topic. In my view, students should include older writings if they are are still useful and helpful.
5. “Do I only include original research items or can I include critiques of research?” You can include critiques because they contribute to the state of knowledge on the topic.

But there is no literature on my topic

What if you do not find any literature on your topic? In a very few cases, nothing has ever been published that is clearly and directly relevant to your topic. Usually, however, much more has been published than students think, and their main difficulties are finding it and seeing how it is relevant.

In these cases, the best practice is usually to review the literature in the next door subjects, that is, those closely related to the topic that do not impinge upon it. The point of the review is to argue that nothing or very little has been written directly on the topic, usually called a gap in the literature. What little there is should be closely examined. I call this Long Bridge strategy for literature reviews. Your task is to build a long bridge between indirectly relevant literature and the topic. Perhaps you feel that are in a unique situation or your topic seems so creative and new.

Consider three kinds of cases:

1. Some journals require a literature review for an article to be acceptable, no exceptions.
2. For all doctoral dissertations, the literature review is mandatory, and you may not ask for an exemption. In most cases, it is a separate section, unless the methodology is documentary analysis. In that case, literature is reviewed as it is relevant to the topic in the text and is not a separate chapter.
3. Some journals do not require a literature review, although the literature review is often beneficial, even if it is not required.
4. For other kinds of work (e.g. lower theses), your supervisor may give a dispensation from the literature review entirely, but this is only as a last resort. (If you are continuing to a doctoral degree by research, lack of a literature review will usually be seen to be unfavorable.)

Annotated bibliography

An early stage in almost all research projects is to do your reading and keep a set of useful notes on what you read.

Writing a long literature review is much easier and less overwhelming when you have a good method. It reduces some complicated tasks to simpler steps, so that you can put your effort into the tasks that require more thought. Instead of immediately trying to write a literature review, it is a much easier to write an annotated bibliography first as a separate stage.

An annotated bibliography is simply a set of organized notes from a reading project on a particular topic or issue with your evaluation of each source. It is then put into a form that others can read:

• A bibliography is a list of references to books, articles, and documents.
• An annotation is like a book review. It contains a brief description of the source, says what it's about (and perhaps gives an outline or list of most important points), and your evaluation of its value and relevance. For example, you might say why it's relevant and important, what's unique about it, and give a brief critique. Annotations don't have a strict word limit, so let them be as long as will be useful.
• An annotated bibliography is a list of references, with an annotation immediately after each one.

Your annotated bibliography should show the role and effects of recent research in the field. It is a way of getting ahead start by learning as much as you can from what has already been written. That way, your research project will build on the work of others rather than repeat it. This also gives a firm theoretical basis for your research.

How long and how many items?

There is no specific rule about how long (or how many words) a literature review must be in a dissertation, because the criteria is really its thoroughness in dealing with the topic. A short review might be adequate for some topics, while a very long review might be inadequate for other topics. However, as a guess at what you might expect, the literature review in a Masters thesis of 20,000 might be about 5,000 words, and it is often from 30 to 50 pages for a PhD. Journal articles usually have strict word limits, so writers can select a limited number of only the most significant and relevant items.

“How many items should be in the annotated bibliography?” All PhD programs have the same answer: “You need to be exhaustive; the search is is not complete until all relevant documents have been reviewed.” However, different institutions and departments have different definitions of “exhaustive.” For example, one answer is to stop looking only when there isn't anything left to find.

The search

Look at the page on doing an internet search. However, for a literature review, you probably won't do a general search of the internet, because you want to do most of your search in several databases of research articles, for example, Google Scholar and Core.

Look at the page on doing an internet search. However, for a literature review, do most of your search in several databases of research articles, for example, Google Scholar and Core. (A general search of the internet will gather lots of non-research materials of little value.)

When you get a relevant and helpful paper:

1. Download a pdf if you can. There are literally millions of articles out there, and you might not be able to find the article again.
2. Make good notes of your comments in whole sentences, so you will understand them later on. (You don't want to go back to them later on and think “What did I mean by that?”) If you make notes on scraps of paper, put them into your word processor document. Most of your time should be spent thinking about the significant matters relevant to your topic, not in the mechanical procedure of searching.
3. Put the bibliographic details into your word processor document. This is often just a copy and paste because many journals have it ready to go.

💡 A collection of tips

1. Get articles on each variable, theory, or questionnaire that you discussed in your preliminary proposal.
2. You might find it helpful to draw up a matrix with research questions in one dimension and articles in the other so that you can easily see topics on which you have done most reading and those that you that you have given much less attention.
3. To save time and graduate sooner, try to increasingly focus your reading and writing as you progress through the literature review. You can safely omit reading (and writing) anything that is unrelated to your research questions. If you have already written anything that is irrelevant, take it out of your main document and save it in a separate file and folder for items that appear to be no longer relevant. (It is usually unwise to delete it completely; as your understanding of the topic deepens, it might become useful later on in a way that you could not have anticipated.) If you spend three pages of in your literature review refining your discussion of something that is not relevant to your final research question, you have cost precious time in your journey to graduation. 1
4. Keep on topic and cover it well. (If a literature review goes off topic, some pages might have to be deleted while other topics are inadequately covered.)
5. If your topic is interdisciplinary, you might need to do a literature review in each field.
6. Get the best value from online databases such as Google Scholar and Core. You will probably get a huge amount of material if you use the keywords well. Then just find those that are helpful. Download the full text.

Writing it up: Introduction

Write a brief introduction explaining your purpose. This will most likely be to explore a topic or issue of some kind and say why it is important. You might need to specify the boundaries of the topic. One or two paragraphs is usually enough for an essay.

Writing it up: Body of the text

As an annotated bibliography, the body of your text is the full biblographical details of each source, followed by your comments on each one.

It is adequate to put your items in alphabetical order of the authors last names, just like a normal bibliography. If it helps you to better organize your notes, you can arrange them under section headings for each topic, with the entries under each topic in alphabetical order.

Writing it up: Conclusion

At the end, write a conclusion so your readers know what you concluded. You should mention general patterns, trends, or themes that you can see in the literature. Present your conclusions in an advanced a state as you can justify from the literature. The conclusion should show that you have achieved the purpose that you stated in the introduction.

A critique is like a book review

A book review is a short article that tells readers about a book and gives a fair evaluation of its main ideas. Most academic and professional journals contain reviews of new books that may interest their readers. The purpose is usually to update readers on new ideas in their field. Authors often submit books in the hope of a favorable review, so that they will sell more (Lecturers sometimes ask students to write them to assess their understanding of particular books.)

A book review normally has the following parts:

1. Clearly report the author's the main purpose for writing the book.
2. Clearly report the main points of the book.
3. Does the book have a particular background that you need to tell your readers about? For example:
• If an author wrote about a particular country, is he/she a local person or a vistor? If the person is a vistor, how long did they live there?
• Did they work in the field they are describing? If the author was a military veteran writing about a battle, you will interpret what they say quite differently from a young armchair amateur, or a prominent academic writing on the same topic.
4. Write a critique 2 identifying any of the following:
• its strengths,
• its unique features,
• things that don't make sense (logical fallacies, gaps),
• topics where it contradicts itself (inconsistencies),
• the main ideas that make up the point of the whole book (its constituent elements),
• its assumptions, and,
• its major implications (i.e. what will change as a result of this book).

Another way of expressing this is the MEAL Plan, which can be a helpful way to construct paragraphs when writing literature reviews:

• Main Idea: Topic sentence stating the claim that the paragraph is advancing.
• Evidence: What does the writer say? Give a paraphrase and or direct quotations from the source.
• Analysis: Explain the source and give an evaluation. It needs to fit the claim of the main idea of the paragraph.
• Lead Out: Give a conclusion that indicates how this paragraph fits into your paper and prepares readers to transition to the next paragraph.

The MEAL plan is helpful but might not always be appropriate. For example, if several articles say almost the same thing, it might be better to report and comment on them together.

Adapted from Wαlden Acαdemic Guides Link, which adapted it from Duke University's Thοmpsοn Writing Prοogrαm (n.d.) "Paragraphing: The MEAL plan." Link

Presentation

Then type it up for presentation according to your institution's style guide. Check the layout and proofread your typing, grammar, and language style.

___________
1. Based on “Working Backwards: Moving Past Brain Freeze and Writing Your Problem Statement.” Moliver, Nina. (Unpublished paper.)
2. With thanks to Bαrbαrα Pαvεy.

For more information:

• More reading
• On annotated bibliographies, see Purdue OWL (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/01/)
• On annotated bibliographies and making it into a literature review see this link.

Comments & critique

The annotations are your comments on sources relating to your topic. For each source, briefly report the main points or ideas, because you cannot presume that your readers can already know that information. Then say why it’s relevant, important, and unique. Make sure you include in-text references to every source you use so that you don’t plagiarise anything.

Consider anything that would affect your interpretation. Did the author have a particular purpose for writing? Or a particular audience? Did the source have a particular background that you need to tell your readers about? For example, if an author wrote about a particular country, is he/she a local person or a vistor? If the person is a visitor, how long did they live there? Did they work in the field they are describing? (If the author was a military veteran writing about a battle, you might interpret what they say quite differently from a young armchair amateur, or a prominent academic writing on the same topic.)

Write a critique. Be polite; this does not necessarily mean find fault because you might find that the source is excellent. Use the same kinds of expressions that you’d have others use to critique you, as long as you are direct enough for your readers to get your point. (A few students are so polite that they don't make their points clearly.)

💡 Hint. Read through the whole journal article, including checking the data. Some authors slant their analyses and findings to find what they wanted to find. Others are more tact than fact; they aim to suit funders, current paradigms, or institutional wishes.

💡 Hint. If you have access only to the abstract, you may include it but perhaps only as a Cf. also ... or See also ... comment.

What else to look for while reviewing literature

Your main goal is to find information that is directly relevant to your specific research topic, especially research findings and conclusions. You can also look for:

1. Terms that have competing definitions. (Sometimes definitions are coined for specific purposes or contexts, but you might need to argue for your own purposes or context.)
2. Some fields in academia have fads and cycles. No matter how important something is, it can go out of style very quickly when no more interesting research emerges or a trendier fad emerges. Some things go in cycles when someone starts to promote an old idea by giving it a new name and definition; it is then treated as if it were an amazing new discovery.
3. Lots of “critique” is dedicated to making distinctions that don't actually matter.
4. Some forms of political correctness can be trendy for a while. These are typically the work of well-meaning persons fighting social justice battles. Ideological assumptions get dragged into the research process and get magically transformed into “confirmed conclusions.” This rather curious phenomenon has several causes:
1. Renaming ideological assumptions as “topics of current interest”
2. Renaming bodies of ideology as conceptual or theoretical frameworks.
3. Circular logic
5. Check for small or biased sample sizes
6. Check for confirmation bias; researchers tend to over-value evidence that supports with their beliefs, and tend to disregard other evidence.
7. Check the evidence given to support conclusions.
8. Follow up on quoted papers. Researchers might rely on well-known papers without checking what they actually say or the validity of their conclusions.
9. Assumptions, especially theoretical and methodological assumptions.
10. Methodological how to information that might inform or justify your own methodology later on, along with supporting references. (Methodologies are usually spelled out in enough detail for someone else to copy them.)
11. Tools that you might use with little or no modification.
12. Methods of analyzing data that you might use to inform or justify your own analysis later on, along with supporting references.
13. Further sources to look up to find more information that is directly relevant to your specific research topic. This then strengthens your bibliography.

The literature review

If you have already written an annotated bibliography, converting it to a literature review is mainly a fairly simple editing task, although it still requires some serious thought

Arranging topics into an outline

You need to develop an outline and decide on section headings that will make sense to your readers. Annotated bibliographies normally put items in the alphabetical order of authors, which is not very helpful for a literature review.

You now have an annotated bibliography that might look like a chaotic mix of different ideas. You now need to turn into a literature review. Your goal is to put the contents into a neat, easy-to-understand order, in language that flows. You want your readers to be able to enjoy reading something that is informative and flows well but still accurately represents the contents.

In essense, you need to group the same ideas together under the main ideas, so that each main idea will become a major section in the outline. Then you need to create outlines for each major section.

To create an outline, find a specific method that works for you. The method you choose is irrelevant as long as it results in an outline that makes sense for your topic and to your readers:

1. Make a list of main topics or themes and see how items fit into the list as subtopics. Make a list with points an outline of the whole chapter, and then write add subpoints as mini-outlines for each main idea or theme.
2. Create a chart and then group articles in parts of the chart with circles or boxes.
3. Draw a mind map or concept map of your topic. Some students find that it helps them to identify topics to explore, while other students use the mindmap as a way to sort ideas into an understandable arrangement.
4. Make a long list of topics and use color code to highlight main ideas and subpoints, and to indicate similar items that belong in the same category.
5. Draw up a matrix with questions in one dimension and articles in the other. This might help you to see easily the topics on which you have done most reading and those that you that you have given much less attention.
6. Some people like to use more than one of these methods.

At least one outline will emerge, even if you don't see it at first; you might even have multiple options from which to choose. Besides, you can change it later on if you come to a better understanding of your topic.

Different kinds of outlines

If possible, the outline should take the shape of a funnel, starting with the broad concepts and progressing logically to the specific research question or hypothesis.* However, outlines can take various forms, and many researchers need to combine these different kinds of outlines:

Strategy 1: History of ideas
Tell the story. The easiest and most logical literature review to read is a history of main ideas, showing how they follow along in sequence and to some extent flow from one to another. The historical approach allows you to trace the origins and development of major ideas, and indicate the false starts and the unexpected insights. This kind of review picks up on trends, assumptions, and watersheds. Watch for developments that happened simultaneously; they tend to mess up the simple linear structure. Be careful not to miss out major developments that are outside your normal field of reading.

Strategy 2: Author by author
A common approach is to consider the works of major writers one by one. This is useful when their specific ideas are directly relevant to your topic, their works are watersheds, or when writers don't fit into categories very neatly.

Strategy 3: Shape of the literature
Discuss the areas in which literature has been written, and when trends dictated that much would be written and when little or nothing would be written. The library stacks will give a rough idea, although familiarity with issues and major writers is necessary to do a good review. It includes mention of especially significant writings that spurred a great deal of other literature to be written. The great strength of this approach is that you can mention whole bodies of literature, describe their general characteristics and assumptions, and give specific examples. This is very appropriate when the literature is massive and the whole is more important than individual parts. (Don't be caught out; there are times when you need to treat each author as having unique ideas that must be addressed individually.)

Strategy 4: Integration
You might be reviewing very different sources from different schools of thought, but you are showing that they are all saying the similar things, are based on similar assumptions, or responding to similar kinds of problems. Your task it then to pull them together into one coherent, overarching theory.

Strategy 5: Spaghetti
Perhaps the most difficult is the case in which a great deal has been written directly upon the topic. You feel like you are finding a path through a tightly knit pile of spaghetti. The way to do it is to divide the literature into groupings according to history, assumptions, or methodology. You can then use the body of literature approach.

* With thanks to Μassimο Sρinella

Outlines have meaning

You might find that new topics emerge and you need to improve the outline to cope with the new topics. Don't be afraid to make the changes even if they are radical. Although perhaps frustrating for you, it is a sign of progress because you have learned something new.

Here's why. Creating and modifying an outline is itself an analytical process; you identify which ideas are the most important and which are the subordinate or peripheral. The challenge is to present them in an order that helps your readers.

When you have a working outline

You will probably go through several drafts of your outline before it is ready to show your supervisor. When you think it is ready, present it to your supervisor as a one-page list of section headings and subheadings to ask for advice and to approve your direction. Later on, you might change the outline and some of those headings as you revise successive drafts. Just check that the changes are improvements and that your supervisor agrees.

Then, do some editing:

1. Based on your outline, edit your comments and critiques into smooth-flowing paragraphs with references to the sources.
2. Include any new relevant items that you have found since you first wrote it.
3. Move bibliographical details to a separate bibliography at the end.
4. Add transitional paragraphs so that the whole chapter flows well. For example, each major section needs an introductiory paragraph.
5. Check that you give enough information for your readers to understand your writing. Your readers probably will not have prior knowledge of everything you know about the topic, so you need to give enough detail to prevent gaps.
6. Add an introduction. (You might be able to use the introduction from the annotated bibliography and edit it.)
7. Add a conclusion that sums up the state of research so far and provides a suitable basis and justification for further research. (Again, you might be able to simply revise the conclusion from the annotated bibliography.)
8. This is your first rough draft of the literature review.

💡 Hint: You can do this by simply moving text around in a word processor document, as long as you save new work as a new file and keep the older versions as backups.

It's done!

The preliminary literature review will be included in your proposal, and, ultimately, will be the basis of the literature review in the final dissertation.