Dissertation Literature Reviews: What Are They, and What’s the Big Deal?
This blog is a repost. It can originally be found on the APU Graduate Writing Blog.
I’ve encountered many students (myself included!) who view a literature review as a time-consuming, technical exercise they have to endure. Many students also question the point of doing it—after all, isn’t the dissertation supposed to be about their original research? Why talk about other people’s work first?
Cooper (1988) defines a literature review (aka, lit review) as a work that not only “uses as its database reports of primary or original scholarship, and does not report new primary scholarship itself,” but also “seeks to describe, summarize, evaluate, clarify, and/or integrate the content of the primary reports” (p.107). In other words, beyond talking about what other scholars have said about a topic, a lit review tells readers what a body of work means as a whole. Professionals need to know not only what their discipline knows about a topic, but also why it is important and what research needs to be done next. These characteristics make the lit review important, but also one of the most challenging parts of a dissertation to write. In this blog post, I outline how dissertation literature reviews are integral to the scholarly endeavor.
A Lit Review Makes You A Scholar (Or at Least Helps You Get There)
The titles scholar and researcher are used interchangeably in academia, but Boote and Beile (2005) distinguish between the two when they state “doctoral students must be scholars before they are researchers” (p. 11). The dictionary defines a scholar as “a specialist in a particular branch of study,” while a researcher conducts “systematic investigation…in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.” Before you go about creating new knowledge, you have to learn what your discipline already knows about a topic. What better way to familiarize yourself with a body of knowledge than doing a literature review?
A Lit Review Makes You A Researcher
In order to meaningfully contribute to your discipline, you need generativity. Boote and Beale (2005) define generativity as “ the ability to build on the scholarship and research of those who have come before us. Generativity grants our work integrity and sophistication” (p. 3). They rank generativity alongside publication and peer-review as features indicating academic excellence. Lit reviews therefore not only tell us what we know about a topic, but they also point towards what we don’t know, “leading to new productive work” (Boote & Beale, 2005, p. 6). A good researcher identifies gaps in others’ research, and uses that as their departure point. Their work is valuable—has “academic excellence”—because it expands an existing conversation.
A Lit Review Is A Way to Gain Good Scholarly Practices
Libutti and Kopala (1995) list the following skills needed to construct a lit review:
Information retrieval and evaluation
Searching and decoding documents to extract important information
Summarizing and presenting important information
Synthesizing information into an argument
In other words, literature reviews require you to summarize, interpret, and analyze a body of work: a cycle of scholarly practices you will conduct over and over again as a professional in your field—even if you never write another formal literature review again.
Persistence is another scholarly practice you will learn by writing a lit review. Good dissertation lit reviews take three to six months of work. You will encounter multiple setbacks in the process—not finding enough sources, trying to understand thick prose, dealing with the self-doubt that can accompany these frustrations—and working through them will give you the stamina needed as a professional.
Another good scholarly practice is staying up-to-date with the literature. At least a year can elapse between writing your proposal and completing your dissertation. In that time, the literature may have changed, or your project may have taken a different turn. You will want to update your literature review to reflect the dissertation you actually wrote, and include any new scholarship relevant to your work. Your dissertation lit review is a dynamic manuscript, not a static one.
A Lit Review Socializes You into Your Discourse Community
“Discourse community” is a fancy term for a group of people who share values, assumptions, and goals, and have distinct ways of communicating amongst members. Academic disciplines and professions make up discourse communities. Writing literature reviews socializes new scholars into their respective discourse communities by teaching them how to “talk the talk.”
This socialization is more than just “the brandishing of names,” or proving you’ve read the requisite works—it also involves “critically interrogat[ing] the literature” (Alton-Lee, 1998, p. 889). Good literature reviews “bring coherence and perspective to problem areas” (Cooper, 1988, p. 105), so your literature review can actually help further a conversation—or keep a community’s discourse going!
Further, the literature review carves out a place for your work in an existing conversation, but you have to make that connection clear. When analyzing the kinds of criticism reviewers gave articles being considered for publication, authors consistently failed to link their findings to existing research (Alton-Lee, 1998, p. 889). In other words, you have to explicitly demonstrate where your work contributes to the conversation—the discourse—you so aptly laid out.
In Summary
A good dissertation literature review is much more than a technical exercise. The process of constructing a lit review initiates you into your discipline’s practices, making you into a scholar and researcher in your field. It also establishes the value of your own research. In subsequent blog posts, I’ll talk about the components of a literature review, and the process of writing one.
References
Alton-Lee, A. (1998). A troubleshooter’s checklist for prospective authors derived from reviewers’ critical feedback. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(8), 887-890.
Boote, D.N., & Beile, P. (2005). Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation. Educational Researcher, 34(6), 3-15.
Cooper, H.M. (1988). Organizing knowledge syntheses: A taxonomy of literature reviews. Knowledge in Society, 1, 104-126.
Libutti, P., & Kopala, M. (1995). The doctoral student, the dissertation, and the library. The Reference Librarian, 22 (48), 5-25. doi: 10.1300/J120v22n48_02
