What is a literature review?
Over the past few modules we’ve been thinking about what you are going to research – your research questions – as well as how you can succinctly articulate what you want to do and hope to find. We’ve also discussed strategies for research. You may have started trying different programs to help you manage your writing and resources such as Endnote, NVivo, Scrivener, and Trello. When it comes to writing up your thesis, however, you need to find a way to organise that information in a way that clearly explains the fields to which your project continues, and how you are filling in a gap. As Gina Wisker points out in your reading for this module, since your ‘research is seen as a contribution to knowledge in the field’, ‘it needs to indicate … that there is an awareness of what that knowledge comprises’ (127). Wisker emphasises the need for a dialogue with those who have come before, and one of the things we’ll do today is to think about how to make that dialogue happen.
Now we’re starting to get into some of the meaty bits of your thesis. The literature review is probably one of the most time-consuming parts of your research process but it’s also one of the most exciting and informative. In basic terms, this is where you look at everything that’s already been done in your topic areas. Notice that I say areas, plural, because although you will have narrowed down your exact research topic for the thesis, you will inevitably be drawing on a couple of fields as part of this topic. For example, in my PhD literature review, I needed to review the literature not just on what had been done in the area of Bowen studies, but I also needed to incorporate a review of the field of trauma theory. My thesis was at the intersection of those two fields. Indeed, one of the ways for you to be original is by bringing two distinct fields to bear on one another in new ways. Remember the sample abstract we looked at in the last module? It too was claiming that part of its newness arose from bringing together two usually discrete fields, saying that, ‘the essay synthesizes two bodies of literature that rarely comment on one another: early Hollywood studio history and works treating the Mexican American experience in Southern California’. Synthesis is another useful term you might use to describe this. Your literature review, as the Yale University Library points out, constitutes both summary and synthesis. While a summary is simply description, synthesis constitutes organisation and evaluation. Your literature review is designed to do both of these things. You are therefore not just reading or reviewing, but critically reflecting on the literature in your fields.