WRITING THE LITERATURE REVIEW (refer website with same name) Why do I have to have a Literature Review?

This is an important question to ask yourself. As well as helping you to write a good literature review, fully understanding the need for such work is what allows you to know you're ontrack, why what you're doing is worthwhile, and that you do have a contribution to make. In other words, the literature review is integral to the whole thesis; it is not just a routine step taken to fulfil formal requirements. You need a good literature review because it: demonstrates that you know the field. This means more than reporting what you've read and understood. Instead, you need to read it critically and to write in such a way that shows you have a feel for the area; you know what the most important issues are and their relevance to your work, you know the controversies, you know what's neglected, you have the anticipation of where it's being taken. All this would allow you to map the field and position your research within the context. justifies the reason for your research. This is closely connected with demonstrating that you know the field. It is the knowledge of your field which allows you to identify the gap which your research could fill. However, it is not enough to find a gap. You have also to be able to convince your reader that what you are doing is important and needs to be done. allows you to establish your theoretical framework and methodological focus. Even if you are proposing a new theory or a new method, you are doing so in relation to what has been done.

The literature review becomes your springboard for the whole thesis. I have made several attempts at beginning to write my literature review but I keep changing it. Is there a 'correct' or proper way to organise it? The literature review is very often, apart from the initial proposal, the first substantial piece of writing that you are asked to do. For this reason alone, it is not surprising you may need to try several possible arrangements of it. Focusing the Literature Review However, over the course of research and writing a PhD thesis, you most likely will write the literature review more than once. As part of the process of trying to formulate their topic, some students write a kind of literature review which is often more like a survey. This could become more focussed as part of a proposal. Usually, once you start to work on your own research, the literature review takes a back seat, though you should systematically keep abreast of new developments in your field. Then, once you are finally 'writing up', the literature review needs either a major revision, or has to be tackled properly for the first time. Understandably, it is only now after two or three years of close work, that the significance of some of the literature you've glossed over earlier might strike you. You are now better equipped to appreciate it and to review it critically.

Also, your research findings could well mean that you need to explore parts of literature that did not initially seem to you to be of direct relevance. Of course, the opposite also happens and perhaps you will decide to exclude whole areas of literature now marginal to your research. Organising the Literature Review The literature review is not an add-on but is absolutely integral to the whole work. So, it should be written in such a way that, in the first place, within the context of the field, it should set up the reader's expectations of where your work fits; it should provide the justification of why you are doing what you are doing; if necessary, it should also establish your theoretical framework and your methodology. A chronological organisation therefore, although it may first suggest itself, is not usually the best way to achieve this. It is more important to isolate the issues and highlight the findings that are relevant to what you are doing. To get back to the question, then, the 'correct or proper way' to organise your literature review is the way you can best fulfil these needs. Since there is no general standard or correct structure, you have to try several possible arrangements to organise it best. It is of course frustrating and time consuming to write the whole literature review several times to see which way serves your purposes the best, but there are some ways that can help you decide on the possible arrangement. Working with a diagram, concept map, or some kind of shorter 'story' (which is more than an outline) will capture the logic of your proposed organisation and therefore allow you to choose the clearest way before you write. Plotting out possible structures in this way also gives you something concrete to discuss with your supervisor or test on other readers. Here is an example of using a story to plot the flow of ideas: Two areas of research are relevant to the research presented in this thesis: A and B. I will first review the literature reporting research into x within A since it is directly relevant to my work. Here I will discuss approaches used to investigate x showing that the ways in which x is conceptualised can be elicited in many ways. I will show that they all give us descriptions of conceptualisation of x and assume that the different ways in which x is conceptualised result in different (but congruent with these conceptualisations) practices. Then I will show that the link between conception and practice has not been proven within this stream of research, although some attempts have been made. I will then talk about attempts to investigate this link (starting with S's study) and analyse the weaknesses of these approaches While there is no correct way to organise the literature review in the sense of there being a recipe to follow, the ingredients we discussed above have to be there. Also, there may well be a best arrangement to serve the needs of your thesis. The literature review is so important to the whole work, it is worth your best efforts. Making Sense of the Literature We do truly wish we could tell you about a reliable or simple way to make sense of the literature. We can say, however, that you need to attend to things at two levels:

One is establishing a system that will allow you to organise the hard copies of the articles etc., and develop a data base for references, so you have easy access under relevant categories and don't chase the same references repeatedly. The other is the more demanding task of understanding and using the literature for your purposes. Without attending to the first task, you could easily become inefficient and frustrated. However, although it is necessary to have some way of keeping track, don't spend all your energies on perfecting your system. It may be a good idea to attend a course for researchers on handling information. Check whether your university's library or computer centre offers such a course. The other task ahead of you - of understanding, reviewing and using the literature for your purposes - goes to the heart of your thesis. We consider this in three stages. Making sense of the literature - first pass When you first come to an area of research, you are filling in the background in a general way, getting a feel for the whole area, an idea of its scope, starting to appreciate the controversies, to see the high points, and to become more familiar with the major players. You need a starting point. This may come out of previous work you've done. If you're new to the area, your supervisor could suggest fruitful starting points. Or you could pursue some recent review articles to begin. Too much to handle At this stage there seems to be masses of literature relevant to your research. Or you may worry that there seems to be hardly anything. As you read, think about and discuss articles and isolate the issues you're more interested in. In this way, you focus your topic more and more. The more you can close in on what your research question actually is, the more you will be able to have a basis for selecting the relevant areas of the literature. This is the only way to bring it down to a manageable size. Very little there If initially you can't seem to find much at all on your research area - and you are sure that you've exploited all avenues for searching that the library can present you with - then there are a few possibilities: You could be right at the cutting edge of something new and it's not surprising there's little around. You could be limiting yourself to too narrow an area and not appreciating that relevant material could be just around the corner in a closely related field. Unfortunately there's another possibility and this is that there's nothing in the literature because it is not a worthwhile area of research. In this case, you need to look closely with your supervisor at what it is you plan to do. Quality of the Literature This begins your first step in making sense of the literature. You are not necessarily closely evaluating it now; you are mostly learning through it. But, sometimes at this stage students do ask us how they can judge the quality of the literature they're reading, as they're not experts. You learn to judge, evaluate, and look critically at the literature by judging, evaluating and looking critically at it. That is, you learn to do so by practising. There is no quick recipe for

doing this but there are some questions you could find useful and, with practice, you will develop many others: Is the problem clearly spelled out? Are the results presented new? Was the research influential in that others picked up the threads and pursued them? How large a sample was used? How convincing is the argument made? How were the results analysed? What perspective are they coming from? Are the generalisations justified by the evidence on which they are made? What is the significance of this research? What are the assumptions behind the research? Is the methodology well justified as the most appropriate to study the problem? Is the theoretical basis transparent? In critically evaluating, you are looking for the strengths of certain studies and the significance and contributions made by researchers. You are also looking for limitations, flaws and weaknesses of particular studies, or of whole lines of enquiry. Indeed, if you take this critical approach to looking at previous research in your field, your final literature review will not be a compilation of summaries but an evaluation. It will then reflect your capacity for critical analysis. Making sense of the literature - second pass You continue the process of making sense of the literature by gaining more expertise which allows you to become more confident, and by being much more focused on your specific research. You're still reading and perhaps needing to re-read some of the literature. You're thinking about it as you are doing your experiments, conducting your studies, analysing texts or other data. You are able to talk about it easily and discuss it. In other words, it's becoming part of you. At a deeper level than before, you are now not only looking at findings but are looking at how others have arrived at their findings; you're looking at what assumptions are leading to the way something is investigated; you're looking for genuine differences in theories as opposed to semantic differences; you also are gaining an understanding of why the field developed in the way it did; you have a sense for where it might be going. First of all you probably thought something like, "I just have to get a handle on this". But now you see that this 'handle' which you discovered for yourself turns out to be the key to what is important. You are very likely getting to this level of understanding by taking things to pieces and putting them back together. For example, you may need to set up alongside one another four or five different definitions of the same concept, versions of the same theory, or different theories proposed to account for the same phenomenon. You may need to unpack them thoroughly, even at the very basic level of what is the implied understanding of key words (for example 'concept', 'model', 'principles' etc.), before you can confidently compare them, which you need to do before synthesis is possible.

Or, for example, you may be trying to sort through specific discoveries which have been variously and concurrently described by different researchers in different countries. You need to ask questions such as whether they are the same discoveries being given different names or, if they are not the same, whether they are related. In other words, you may need to embark on very detailed analyses of parts of the literature while maintaining the general picture. Making sense of the literature - final pass You make sense of the literature finally when you are looking back to place your own research within the field. At the final pass, you really see how your research has grown out of previous work. So now you may be able to identify points or issues that lead directly to your research. You may see points whose significance didn't strike you at first but which now you can highlight. Or you may realise that some aspect of your research has incidentally provided evidence to lend weight to one view of a controversy. Having finished your own research, you are now much better equipped to evaluate previous research in your field. From this point when you have finished your own research and you look back and fill in the picture, it is not only that you understand the literature and can handle it better, but you could also see how it motivates your own research. When you conceptualise the literature in this way, it becomes an integral part of your research. Writing the Literature Review What we are talking about here is the writing of the review. We assume that you have made sense of the literature, and that you know the role of the literature and its place in your thesis. Below are links to other sections covering these aspects. You will doubtless write your literature review several times. Since each version will serve a different purpose, you should not think you are writing the same thing over and over and getting nowhere. Where you may strike trouble is if you just try to take whole sections out of an earlier version and paste them into the final version which, by now, has to be differently conceived. In practical terms, it is necessary to have an overall picture of how the thread runs through your analysis of the literature before you can get down to actually writing a particular section. The strategy which writers use as a way to begin the literature review is to proceed from the general, wider view of the research you are reviewing to the specific problem. This is not a formula but is a common pattern and may be worth trying. Let's look at an example taken from the first pages of a literature review. This shows us the progression from general to specific and the beginning of that thread which then continues through the text leading to the aims. Despite the undisputed success of quantum mechanics, many important fundamental problems and questions remain unanswered (see for example X, 1973): the measuring process cannot be satisfactorily described in QM formalism; there are great mathematical stumbling blocks to attempt to make QM consistent with the assumptions of special relativity; .., just to name a few.

[This is basically an introductory section, which starts with a statement of the problem in very broad terms, alerting us to the fact that not everything is rosy, and proceeds to sketch in specific aspects.] Without doubt, one of the most widely discussed of these is [this closes in on what the focus of the problem is] Like most fundamental issues in physics, this question leads to challenges at several levels of thought. At the philosophical level this issue poses questions about . At the physical level we are forced to examine . At the mathematical level many questions are raised about the completeness and logical consistency . [The text moves on to specify issues at various levels. Although the focus is sharper, the coverage at the same time opens out.] An important instance in which all of these challenges converge occurs with the concept of 'angle' in the description of quantum systems [Thus the text has set up the situation where all aspects of the problem-theoretical, practical, etc.--are brought together.] Whatever the pattern which fits your work best, you need to keep in mind that what you are doing is writing about what was done before. But, you are not simply reporting on previous research. You have to write about it in terms of how well it was done and what it achieved. This has to be organised and presented in such a way that it inevitably leads to what you want to do and shows it is worth doing. You are setting up the stage for your work. For example, a series of paragraphs of the kind: "Green (1975) discovered ."; "In 1978, Black conducted experiments and discovered that ."; "Later Brown (1980) illustrated this in "; demonstrates neither your understanding of the literature nor your ability to evaluate other people's work. Maybe at an earlier stage, or in your first version of your literature review, you needed a summary of who did what. But in your final version, you have to show that you've thought about it, can synthesise the work and can succinctly pass judgement on the relative merits of research conducted in your field. So, to take the above example, it would be better to say something like: "There seems to be general agreement on x, (for example, White 1987, Brown 1980, Black 1978, Green 1975) but Green (1975) sees x as a consequence of y, while Black(1978) puts x and y as . While Green's work has some limitations in that it ., its main value lies in ." Approaching it in this way forces you to make judgements and, furthermore, to distinguish your thoughts from assessments made by others. It is this whole process of revealing limitations or recognising the possibility of taking research further which allows you to formulate and justify your aims. *** *** ***