Read Understanding Research Online
Authors: Marianne Franklin
Understanding Research (18 page)
Taking all the above on board at once can be more than a little bit daunting. And it may come as little surprise for some to hear that very often undergraduate/ postgraduate research dissertations are, in effect, largely literature reviews! Nonetheless, even for a more philosophically inclined project (where the data to be gathered and analyzed is literature – written texts), this is not to say that a research project is reducible to ‘the
literature
’ in the final analysis; it is necessary but not sufficient on its own.
Still, the ‘literature
review
’ is something that is much easier said than done; there are various degrees of confusion, for students at all stages, about how much is expected of them from their supervisors and/or institutions, and how much space this element should take in the final report, indeed where it fits in the larger narrative. Moreover, where to start searching for literature is increasingly bewildering in these ICT-embedded, web-dependent, and inter-textual, hyperlinked days.
So what are the main pitfalls? When does a literature search morph into our literature review and what weight does it have in our final report?
The mini self-evaluation exercise intimates what the pitfalls are when first confronting this particular element. Even if everyday use of the term or its prevalence as a self-contained homonymous chapter in dissertations appears to be nine-tenths of the law, it would be safe to say that there are certain things that readers, and examiners, are not looking for. In other words a literature review is
- not a set of book reviews where each author or book is handled in turn, treated equally and without reflection on where their work fits or does not fit your project, or vice versa; your ideas, central claims, vocabulary, and citations, following the order of author accordingly;
- not an overly reverential presentation of ideas, thinkers, or debates to the detriment of the other side of the story;
- not an over-dependence on one or several texts, certain sorts of philosophical exegeses excepted;
- not an unbalanced critique based on a
strawman argument
that misrepresents complex ideas for self-serving reasons; - not an array of books or articles randomly picked without due consideration;
- not a list of publications dotted through the main text, as an after-thought, an exercise in name-dropping, or in lieu of argument. This tendency is often signalled by repeatedly bracketed big names/big ideas as opposed to a concerted engagement with them in substantive or thematic ways;
- not an over-reliance on large quotes or secondary sources – particularly common with the Big Names whose work has produced a substantial secondary literature in its own right; for example, Bourdieu, Foucault, Arendt, Machiavelli, Spivak, Popper, Kuhn, Adorno, de Beauvoir, Butler, inter alia;
- not a free-floating chapter or section that bears little relation to your stated aims and objectives, research question, theoretical framework, or methodology.
Where the theoretical and methodological literature intersect, and where they need to be treated separately, is often a major headache during the writing-up phase, particularly when word-restrictions are an issue or when the theory and the method sections start to go in different directions; not uncommon along the spectrum of absolute beginners to experienced researchers!
**TIP: All the more reason to realize that right from the get-go, there is one cardinal rule of thumb. As John Creswell puts it: a ‘first step in any project is to spend considerable time in the library examining the research on a topic. . . .
This point cannot be overemphasised
’ (Creswell 2009: 23, 25, emphasis added). In other words, there is a certain amount of legwork that needs doing even if, nowadays, a library is not longer just a physical building but also a virtual, and multiple one now that the internet has become embedded in contemporary teaching, learning, and research practices.
For this reason we need to bear in mind that references to your literature review encompass a process (searching and getting control of literatures) as well as a product (writing this up in a coherent way). Below are some practical rules of thumb.
With some sense of what literature reviews are not (supposed to end up as), let’s take a closer look at what we should strive for when searching the literature and writing literature reviews; as process and product.
First, some general rules of thumb for getting on with things:
- No matter where you’re setting out on your research in geographical or disciplinary terms, one of your very first tasks is to access, and then get a grasp of the literature/s. Locate and collate, read and digest, then synthesize and critique it (in positive and negative terms) from the point of view of your topic, your research question. This is a two-way street as the more you read, the more focused and well-defined your research question will become (see
Chapter 3
). - Remembering that in terms of writing up or presenting the mass of books and articles you’ve read, the UK system puts more emphasis on having this part done and dusted quite early on. In continental Europe this is also the case as a rule. However, it is also expected to be significantly reworked later on.
- Sometimes this means it emerges in another form: interwoven into chapters or sections dealing with historical background, case-study description, the theory/ theoretical framework, and as noticed previously, in the presentation of your
method. Whichever form and location the review takes in the final analysis, it is not advisable to introduce new ideas, thinkers, or themes towards the end of the project. - If you treat getting this overview of the literature/s as an integral part of your research as a verb (doing) and a noun (naming) you will be less inclined to see it as such a bugbear. At the end of the day you are expected to show the interconnection between your own thinking and research in a dialogue with extant research. In short, your study is not happening in a vacuum.
- By the same token, neither is it entirely derivative. The trick is finding the balance between (wild) claims at originality and (overly) anxious attempts to be onside with everything you have read or been told to read. Hopefully the outcome will be that reading inspires you, rather than sends you into a slough of despondency (see M. Davies 2007: Introduction).
- A crucial aspect of designing a research project entails getting a sense of what is out there, what has been done, and whether your idea and proposed method/s to get data, however defined, is viable. The literature search side helps you check that you’re not setting out to reinvent the wheel, gives you a sense of the lie of the land; sometimes referred to as knowing the ‘field’ or ‘fields’.
- The point here is for you to broaden your horizons, have your assumptions challenged, allow you to put some of your more ambitious plans (or not so grandiose ones) better into perspective. The data-gathering that follows will be the better for this broader knowledge. In this respect we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
7 - At the very least you indicate that you’ve read and understood the main texts from the relevant classes you have taken (this is why courses have literature lists; they’re there to pave the way). This is why a strong emphasis is put on getting this part done early on, in both senses of the term: searching, gathering a pool of literature and then committing yourself in written form. The view here is that without this aspect well under your belt your research project will come unstuck, make no sense to others, and you could end up revealing your ignorance, not getting finished on time, or submitting a piece of work you are not happy with at all.
- Even if you are a late-starter with this aspect of the project, or find that later on in the research you discover a key item – book, article, blog/s, online archive – that causes you to reconsider some of your basic ideas or working assumptions, this need not mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A revision of the initial literature review and editing will allow for these later discoveries to be integrated into earlier reading.
- When writing up the final report, particularly when putting your research in these larger literature-based contexts, try to avoid over-citation to other people’s work. It is your voice and input that counts by this point in that readers are not there to read paragraph after paragraph, page after page of potted summaries of other literature. The ‘lit review’ section needs to be in proportion to your own work and words. This is why it is useful to consider the final presentation of this part of your research as the moment you put your project in a larger context, not just in terms of those whose work you choose to use, or need to acknowledge, but also those approaches you do not engage with, in full or in part. Examiners in Ph.D.
defences may well ask you to explain why you do not engage with such and such school of thought, or thinker.
These rules of thumb need some breaking-down; first in terms of the process and second with respect to the product side of the coin.
For literature searches, and their emergence as your literature review, that are not based on the systematic approach covered above, we need to break things down to the process and the production side of things.
First up: the process, which is the locating, filtering and selecting, and then getting a grip on the relevant literature. Assuming that you have decided upon your topic, and have some sense of your main and subsidiary research questions, this element works along three axes: (1) broad and specific themes, for example
Globalization, Global Warming, New Media, Gender and Voting Patterns
; (2) key authors along with their critics and followers; and (3) how both these dimensions play out in a disciplinary sense: for example, how Pierre Bourdieu’s work is relevant for sociologists on the one hand, or is applied in international relations or media and communications on the other; how philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper are understood in science and technology studies which is distinct from how philosophers debate their work; how terms like ‘evidence’, ‘proof’ or ‘interpretation’ are treated, and debated by political scientists, literary theorists, physicists, or legal scholars. For undergraduate and master-level dissertations, managing the first two is already a considerable task. For Ph.D. work and onwards, the third element emerges in implicit and explicit ways dependent on how strong processes of socialization – disciplining power – of respective departments and faculties work themselves out along the way.
8
When starting out on a literature review in the sense of it being a search, you can cast your net wide (drift-netting) or you can start close to home, with a specific topic or thinker or idea in mind (line and hook).
To continue the fishing metaphor – there are many metaphors available (see Gray 2009: 101) – somewhere in between lies surf-casting; standing at the water’s edge and casting out a long line and bait into the breaking surf, a slightly larger area. Starting out wide means that you need to narrow the search at some point, sort out what you net. Likewise when starting out closer to home, you need to cast your hook, or net, a bit farther out at some point in order to maintain perspective. For example: consider three places you can go; starting out close to shore and then moving into deeper waters so to speak:
- Course outlines and their reading lists, including those already completed; an often overlooked ready-made resource.
- The reference lists in books, and articles pertinent to your project or which you find interesting; again, this is a resource full of possible leads to other work.
- Keyword searches in specific, academic but not exclusively, databases; for more on this use of the web see
Chapter 5
.
The paradox to this initial casting about is that often the ‘right’ literature does not emerge, or you don’t see it until your own research question and central proposition have been more refined. Once you have acquired some sense of where the horizon lies, with the help of course literature outlines, supervisors’ recommendations and your own searching-surfing around databases, use of search engines to navigate the web, and other sources, the next challenge is filtering and evaluating this swathe of material. This middle phase precedes and accompanies the writing up of all this knowledge into some sort of coherent, synthetic account for another audience, not that audience of one that is you, yourself. Whilst a large part of your search and selection need to be done before the writing up, it should be clear by now that these three phases are closely related; both in turn are then influenced by your eventual findings and how you went about them.
What does writing up mean? A literature review is not a book review in the conventional sense of the term; presenting a synopsis and then giving it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Rather it is a
refinement
of this initial read; something that all methods textbooks and guides stress on one way or another. It’s about you showing how you link any author or cluster of authors, idea or big theory, theme, or debate/s to your research topic, your method, and your theoretical framework.
The space between finding and reading book/s and other material and then being able to present that knowledge in its own right, and with respect to your topic entails another stage of work, another level of abstraction than those first notes, first impressions. This is where all the thinking-work happens: before the data-gathering is completed but often afterwards in the editing and reworking phase. This is the difference between taking notes or copying out direct quotes from a text for your own reference and paraphrasing the main ideas as part of a virtual conversation you have been having with others, for other readers.
9
Alongside variations in how the ‘lit review’ works with a project’s presentation of its particular theory, or conceptual framework (see
Chapter 2
), there are different levels of expectation for bachelor-, master-, and then Ph.D.-level literature reviews; in terms of the depth and breadth of the literature students need to read and how they present this knowledge in their final piece of work.
By Ph.D. level the student should be able to demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge, and ability to synthesize and apply selected literature, whereas a master-level discussion shows a relatively well-rounded knowledge of the main lines of these debates and key literature. A bachelor-level dissertation (research paper) is one in which the range of literature consulted is narrower. Nonetheless, in both cases for ambitious students, there is not necessarily an upper limit. That said, at some point you will have to stop, choose, and then present what you’ve read for another audience.
Sometimes fascinating books, articles, or thinkers have to be left out. You can always return to them another day.
To recapitulate, the term
review
is both a noun and a verb; a naming word and a doing word. It is this dual aspect to this part of your work that needs to be borne in mind. Once the search and selection has taken place, and you have the requisite overview of the field/s, comprised of recurring debates, canonical figures, or key concepts, you present this knowledge in a distilled form in such a way that it accompanies and underpins your project.