Dissertation Literature Reviews: How Do I Write One?
This blog is a repost. It can originally be found on the APU Graduate Writing blog.
In the first blog post of this series, we talked about why literature reviews are important to the academic endeavor and how the process itself shapes a person into a credible scholar and researcher. In the second blog post, we looked at what components a literature review has and discussed how to determine its intellectual quality. Now that we understand literature reviews as a genre, we can get practical: how do we write a literature review?
Randolph (2009) outlines five steps to creating a lit review:
Problem formulation
Data collection
Data evaluation
Analysis and interpretation
Public presentation
These steps should be familiar to you: they mirror the process for any research project, whether it is a term paper or a dissertation. You will go through many of the same processes as you write your lit review as well as use many of the same skills. So the good news is you are well equipped!
For our discussion, assume that you have already completed steps one through three—you formulated your research question, you found the related literature, and you’ve evaluated the literature and decided which sources you’ll include in your lit review. We’ll talk about steps four and five as three separate parts: organize, synthesize, and make an argument. These three components roughly correlate to a lit review’s what, so what, and now what components, respectively: a lit review synthesizes what we already know about a topic, tell us why this knowledge is important, and outlines what needs to be done next. I’ll continue using Wych (2012) as an example of these principles.
Analysis: Organize
Analysis involves examining the parts of a body of literature so that we can understand its composition. Analysis answers the question “what elements does this literature have?” Analyzing a topic will often determine how the literature review should be organized. Cooper’s taxonomy lays out three organizational schemes—historical, conceptual, and methodological.
Wych (2012) conceptually organized her lit review. She lays out eight concepts, or categories:
Gender typing of instruments
Instrument preferences of young (pre-band/ pre-orchestra) students
Opinions about which gender should play which instruments
Gender influences during the instrument selection process
Status of gender stratification within existing performing ensembles
Perceptions of musicians in relation to their gender and instrument
Theories as to why gender associations and stereotypes occur
Attempts at remediation
These categories are her study’s first-level headers. They lay out the components of how gender and instrument choice are related. Wych (2012) examines nineteen articles in her lit review, but rather than sequentially giving summaries of each study (as if she was writing an annotated bibliography), she mentions several studies across categories to put them in conversation with each other. For example, an article that discusses gender typing of instruments probably also talked about how that concept influences people’s opinions about which gender should play which instruments. Wych would talk about the article in both places.
Wych (2012) organizes her lit review conceptually, but lit reviews can also be organized historically (also called chronologically) or by methodology. I’ll use an example from my own work to illustrate this point. If I was writing a lit review examining pivotal studies on music practices in Nepal with a goal of theoretical criticism, then I could chronologically organize the lit review. That way, I could examine how theories from different decades impacted ethnomusicologists’ work during those same time periods. Or, if the lit review on the same topic was more comprehensive with the goal of integration, I could organize it by common categories in ethnomusicology, such as folk music, popular music, and classical music. If the goal of my lit review was to identify central methodological issues, then I could organize it by methods: Which studies used participant-observation? Which studies used music analysis? Which ones relied on surveys? Did anyone use interviews? Were all these methods qualitative, or were any quantitative? Examining the literature in this way might allow me to demonstrate what approaches have been fruitful, and what approaches ethnomusicologists should try next.
Whichever way you decide to organize your sources, this analysis allows your reader to see what has been done in the field. But you don’t want to stop at putting like items together—your next aim is to tell your reader so what, or what these studies mean.
Interpretation: Synthesize
The easiest way to tell readers what these composite parts mean is to walk your reader through an argument. Let’s examine one of Wych’s (2012) paragraphs to see how she accomplishes this:
A natural question when considering gender-based instrument association is what role the director might play in conforming to or rejecting these stereotypes. Johnson and Stewart (2004) examined this effect by….These results were corroborated by a second study investigating the effects of both race and gender on instrument assignment…These results are reassuring that instructor bias does not seem to play a major role in instrument assignment…These findings indicate that conceptions and preferences brought into the selection process by students themselves are stronger factors in creating gender-based associations than are any biases of the educators facilitating the selection process. (p. 26)
In this paragraph, Wych (2012) starts with a question that her target audience will most likely have. Starting your argument with audience assumptions is a common argument strategy. She starts with this idea to get her reader’s attention, but then demonstrates how the literature leads to a different conclusion. The phrases in bold tell the reader how they should interpret the summaries she is giving. While Wych appropriately attributes information, she is confident in her own interpretation: notice that not every sentence has a citation at the end.
We can glean two principles from Wych’s (2012) example: It is ok to include summaries of the studies under consideration, as long as your reader understands why you are talking about them. Also, you should not be afraid to tell your reader what these things mean.
Presentation: Make an Argument
You should not just present information in your literature review; you should still make an argument. The principle you learned about thesis statements in essay writing applies to lit reviews as well: have a main point about your body of literature, and support it.
The goal of the literature review will determine the thesis statement. Generally, dissertation literature reviews argue for a gap in the literature, so your lit review should justify the gap you perceive—and that your dissertation research will fill. Because lit reviews can be complex, it is ok to make several points about your literature. If it helps, you can follow a what, so what, now what format: tell your reader what you are looking at, why it matters, and what should happen next.
Wych (2012) makes this argument in both her introduction and conclusion. Here is how she re-states her points in her conclusion:
[what] It is clear through this body of research that gender-based instrument stereotypes not only exist [so what] but also are affecting the choices beginning band students make and the experiences they encounter throughout their time in public school music. Although some attempts at remediation have been made, gender remains an active influence in students’ decision-making process…[now what] Further work in this area will benefit efforts to construct an environment in which students can choose whichever instrument fits them best, free of gender-based stereotypes. (p. 30)
Just make sure you not only tell your reader what, but also so what, and what the next steps are—which in the case of a dissertation, the “now what” is the new research findings the dissertation presents.
The Writing Process
Some students think they must re-invent their writing process when they encounter a lit review for the first time. Some of the writing habits that served you in the past may not serve you when writing a lit review, thus you may indeed need to revisit them (e.g., procrastinate, stay up writing all night before the due date, and then turn in whatever you generated at 3AM as your “research paper”). But that is not necessarily so. You most likely took notes while reading your literature and began thinking about your paper as you read. You may have even started outlining your paper before you completed reading all your literature. If that is the case, then you have already begun writing your lit review!
Nevertheless, to calm some fears, I’ll talk about the writing process I usually follow—not because my writing process is the best, but because it is the process I know best.
Start where you are most comfortable: I always start with my body paragraphs, and I will start on whichever point I feel most confident about. I can always go back and write other points later in my writing process.
Pace yourself: If I only write a few paragraphs a day, then I am making progress!
Writing is recursive: I rarely finish one section before moving onto another one. I often find myself working on several sections of my paper at the same time. That is ok.
Resist the urge to edit at first: Line editing is my favorite stage of the writing process. But I don’t want to waste my time wrangling a sentence from passive to active voice, musing over word choice, or looking for prepositional phrases to cut if I’m not sure that sentence will end up in my final draft. So I first write a draft that would embarrass even Anne Lamott, decide on organization, and strengthen support before I even think of editing.
Make pre- and post-draft outlines: I usually have a not-so-detailed outline of my paper that guides my first draft, but before I revise my first draft, I reverse-outline it. This exercise allows me to take stock of what I actually wrote, see at-a-glance what gaps I may have in my argument, and see if I need to consider a different organization.
Write your conclusion, and then your introduction: Remember, the writing process is also your learning process. By the time I’ve written my paper’s body, I know what my main points are, so I can write a good conclusion that summarizes my paper’s argument. I usually discover that the restatement of my thesis in my conclusion is clearer than my original iteration, so I cut and paste it into my introduction as my main thesis statement. Only then can I think about what would be helpful to my reader before they read my argument.
In sum: your reader will read your lit review from top to bottom, but you do not have to write it from top to bottom!
Final Thoughts
The purpose of a lit review—usually to lay out and evaluate what other people have had to say on a topic and determine what research needs to be done next—may be slightly different than other kinds of papers, but the process of researching and writing a literature review is the same as writing any other academic paper. Take the time to evaluate your own lit review alongside the guidelines in these three blog posts. Now, how does your literature review measure up? Which areas do you need to revise?
References
Cooper, H.M. (1988). Organizing knowledge syntheses: A taxonomy of literature reviews. Knowledge in Society, 1, 104-126.
Randolph, J.J. (2009). A guide to writing the dissertation literature review. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 14(13), 1-13. Retrieved from http://pareonline.net/pdf/v14n13.pdf
Wych, G.M.F. (2012). Gender and instrument associations, stereotypes, and stratification: A literature review. Update, 30(2), 22-31. doi: 10.1177/8755123312437049
