This blog is a repost. It can originally be found on the APU Writing Center’s Graduate Blog.

Literature reviews in the social sciences accomplish many things. For example, they can generate hypotheses, show gaps in the literature, or situate new research within existing bodies of knowledge (Randolph 2009). Doctoral students learn these generic properties of literature reviews as they write them for their seminar papers, comprehensive exams, and eventually their dissertation (if you need re-acquaintance with these aspects, check out our previous blogs on literature reviews). Writing literature reviews often requires doctoral students to put bodies of literature in conversation in new ways, but in many cases, doctoral students are engaging with existing scholarly conversations.

When scholars build on each other’s work, it doesn’t mean they randomly cite each other. They talk to each other at conferences and collaborate on research. They sit on the same professional society committees and peer review each other’s work. They teach in the same departments or campuses. They debate with each other on professional society listservs. They Tweet each other’s ideas, comment on each other’s Facebook posts, and follow Instagram stories of each other’s work. In my own discipline, scholars may share a music instructor or play in the same band or ensemble. All these activities shape their scholarly writing. Additionally, as scholars continue researching a subject, they may make discoveries that negate or augment their previous work. For these reasons, a literature review does not just reflect hypothetical conversations; instead, it often critically evaluates real conversations actual people are having.

Additionally, different strands of research within a field or between related disciplines interact with each other. For example, when people think about music research, they often think of the discipline of musicology; however, ethnomusicology and anthropology also study music. Each of these disciplines examines music but conceptualizes it, and thus approaches it, differently. Each of these disciplines has sought to distinguish itself from the others. These differences manifest in institutional differences (different departments, different professional associations, different journals, different degree conferral, etc.), but nevertheless, these disciplines have drawn from each other both methodologically and theoretically. Understanding the congruence and differences between these disciplines is crucial to know how music is researched today. Therefore, a literature review in ethnomusicology often traces how an idea related to music has grown across these different disciplines.  

For these reasons, when doctoral students write literature reviews, they need to make clear not only what connections are being made, but also who is making them—in this case, who can be a literal person or a discipline at large. The concept of historiography can help frame this aspect of writing literature reviews. Here is one definition of historiography:

Historiography is most broadly understood as the theory and history of historical knowledge, communicated through rigorous examination and critique of extant sources on a subject. Some of the essential questions for historiography include how other scholars have framed a subject and analyzed its discourse. Knowledge of the history of a field helps one to identify past debates as well as current questions and areas of research that still require investigation. In short, the key to understanding where research will go is to understand where it has already ventured. (McCollum and Herbert 2014, 362, emphasis mine)

When you write literature reviews, you can take a lesson from historiography—you can think of yourself as a historian questioning “how other scholars have framed a subject and analyzed its discourse” (McCollum and Herbert 2014, 362). Here are four practices to implement as you construct your literature review, which I will discuss in the following blogposts:

1. Disclose existing conversations: How do I format secondary citations?

2. Deploy theory, don’t reconstruct it: How detailed does my lit review need to be?

3. Discover the real people behind the discourse: Is my tone academic enough?

4. Develop critical awareness of with whom you are engaging in your own work and how: Move from the technical to the epistemological.

Each of these principles stems from common questions that doctoral students bring to their writing center appointments, but as I will show, the answers to these questions are deeper than the immediate mechanical concerns these students have.

The content of this blog post series is most applicable to doctoral students in PhD programs in the social sciences and the humanities. If you are in a professional program in the health sciences (e.g., DPT or DNP) and you write systematic literature reviews, then the principles outlined in these blog posts may not be as applicable to your work. As this blog series will show, a literature review in the social sciences often evaluates the state of knowledge on a given topic to demonstrate a research gap while a systematic literature review answers a focused clinical question, confirms a hypothesis, or evaluates the effectiveness of an intervention using available evidence-based literature.

References:

McCollum, Jonathan, and David G. Herbert, eds. 2014. Theory and Method in Historical Ethnomusicology. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Randolph, Justus. 2009. “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review.” Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation 14(13), 1-13.