Dissertation Literature Reviews: What Components Does a Good Lit Review Have?
This blog is a repost. The original can be found on the APU Graduate Writing Blog.
In the last blog post, we talked about why literature reviews are important to the academic endeavor and how the process itself makes a person into a credible scholar and a researcher.
In this blog post, we will look at the components of a literature review and discuss how to evaluate its contents.
Components of a Lit Review: Cooper’s Taxonomy
Harris M. Cooper—a social psychologist now at Duke University who writes about research methods and research syntheses (aka, lit reviews!)—came up with a taxonomy to gauge the quality of lit reviews in psychology and education. His categories are in Table 1:
Table 1. Cooper’s Taxonomy of Literature Reviews
Characteristics Categories
Focus Research outcomes
Research methods
Theories
Practices and applications
Goal Integration
a) Integration
b) Conflict resolution
c) Linguistic bridge building
Criticism
Identification of central issues
Perspective Neutral representation
Espousal of a position
Coverage Exhaustive
Exhaustive with selective criteria
Representative
Central or pivotal
Organization Historical
Conceptual
Methodological
Audience Specialized scholars
General scholars
Practitioners
General public
Note. Adapted from “Organizing Knowledge Synthesis: A Taxonomy of Literature Reviews,” by H.M. Cooper, 1988, Knowledge in Society 1, p. 109. Copyright by Springer Science and Business Media.
This taxonomy articulates the characteristics that a literature review should have. The column on the right lists the possible choices for the components in the column on the left.
I’ve applied this taxonomy to a literature review from music education to illustrate how it works. Wych (2012) discusses how gender stereotypes influence which instruments students choose when they start a school music program. Table 2 summarizes her literature review:
Table 2. Cooper’s Taxonomy Applied to Wych’s Literature Review
Characteristics Categories
Focus Research outcomes
Research methods
Theories
Goal Integration
Identification of central issues
Perspective Espousal of a position
Coverage Central or pivotal
Representative
Organization Conceptual
Audience Practitioners
We can construct a succinct description of Wych (2012) using these characteristics:
Wych’s (2012) lit review has the goal of integrating what we know about how gender stereotypes influence student instrument choice, but she is not neutral in her approach. Her perspective is an espousal of a position: her audience—in this case, music instructors—needs to counteract the influence of gender stereotypes on student instrument choice. An additional goal emerges from this position: she talks about the central issue of counteracting these gender stereotypes as they relate to instrument selection. To convince her audience, she focuses on research outcomes as well as theories, but briefly covers research methods and study design to evaluate how we know these things. She covers pivotal studies in this area, supplemented by more recent, representative works. She organizes this literature—nineteen articles—conceptually by dividing it into eight different categories.
As Wych’s writing demonstrates, a lit review can combine several characteristics in each of the categories. So while Cooper (1988) developed this taxonomy with psychology and education in mind, it is helpful in examining lit reviews from other disciplines too.
Evaluating a Lit Review
Cooper’s taxonomy is a good starting point for thinking about the components of a lit review and whether or not individual lit reviews meet all the criteria. But how do you determine if a lit review is good? You can ask questions to determine a lit review’s intellectual quality. Cooper (1988) identifies three components of intellectual quality: (a) clarity and resolve, (b) increased explanatory and predictive power, and (c) consistency, conciseness, and elegance. Let’s see how Wych (2012) addresses these components.
Clarity and Resolve
First, a good lit review clearly articulates which of these characteristics it addresses. Cooper (1988) calls this utility. He judges a lit review’s utility by seeing if it answered the questions it asked: Does the reviewer make the aim of their review clear to their reader? Do the components work together as a logical whole? In writing center speak, does a writer clearly articulate a main point, provide convincing evidence to support their point, and organize their argument well? Good prose is much more than pretty writing—it communicates the aims of a study! Wych’s (2012) research question is implied, but nevertheless clear: how does the perceived relationship between gender and musical instruments influence grade school students’ instrument selection when they enter a school music program? She then examines how existing literature answers this question. The concepts around which she organizes her lit review identify multiple variables related to gender that can influence a student’s choice of musical instrument.
Increased Explanatory and Predictive Power
Wych (2012) identifies several trends concerning why one gender plays some instruments more than others, and makes predictions from those trends. Consider the following: “These findings indicate that as long as this group of elementary-age students continues in instrumental music, proportions of females in traditionally male-typed instruments in high school and college ensembles should increase” (Wych, 2012, p. 27). Additionally, Wych (2012) notes a possible, useful additional study: “A replication of this study would be of value to the music education community to further track gender proportion trends through the 1990s and 2000s” (p.27). The explanatory and predictive power of Wych’s review is really strong throughout.
Consistency, Conciseness, and Elegance
Style consistency also provides cohesion to a work, and differs from discipline to discipline. Likewise, conciseness is relative: it depends on the subject, discipline, and publication forum. A discipline’s values will determine the elegance of a written work. In other words, is the lit review a pleasure to read? Does it follow the conventions of academic prose?
Wych (2012) follows APA style conventions within her lit review, as the journal in which it is published follows APA style guidelines. APA values conciseness, so Wych’s review is short: it is only nine printed pages long, including the reference list. For APA, elegance is usually equated with conciseness.
Overall, Wych’s (2012) lit review has a high intellectual quality—we have a bigger picture of the phenomenon, ways to explain it, and guideposts for further action, all conveyed within elegant prose.
What ~ So What ~ Now What
Someone recently described a literature review to me as an answer to three short questions on a topic: What? So What? Now What? In other words, lit reviews synthesize what we already know about a topic, tell us why this knowledge is important, and identify what research needs to be done next. We’ll look closely at how this framework manifests in the construction of a lit review in our next blog post.
References
Cooper, H.M. (1988). Organizing knowledge syntheses: A taxonomy of literature reviews. Knowledge in Society, 1, 104-126.
Wych, G.M.F. (2012). Gender and instrument associations, stereotypes, and stratification: A literature review. Update, 30(2), 22-31. doi: 10.1177/8755123312437049
