Chapter Two: Literature Review

Literature Reviews: The Art of Letting Go 
So, you have your topic secured for your dissertation, and it is a topic you’ve explored in a variety of ways in your classes. At some point in your program, you probably figured out a general area of focus, and then you started “working smarter” by writing papers that you envisioned forming a lot of your dissertation. Perhaps this is the case. Just keep in mind that you are going to have to let go of some of your work in order to make sure your chapter two is designed specifically to support your research question – not just something that takes up a lot of space with a whole lot of references that you’ll have at the end of this thing. 
It is very ,very rare when a student goes through his or her prospectus defense and isn’t instructed to revise – whether slightly or substantially – his or her literature review. Why? After all, this is what you’ve done up to this point. You’ve written papers – lots of papers. Why should it be so difficult to write a good literature review for your dissertation? While not exhaustive, here are some of the common errors I have encountered in the dissertations I’ve reviewed:

1. Incoherence – This is the primary problem I have seen with literature reviews. It is the plight of the cutting and pasting from previous papers. It shows. Often students have seen their work so many times that they do not realize they have pasted elements together poorly. They also run the risk of repeating sentences of whole sections by virtue of cutting and pasting. To avoid this I would challenge you to cut and paste nothing. This doesn’t mean that you cannot use work you have done in the past, but you need to make sure you are deliberate in what you choose to use.

2. Distractions – Typically research papers cover a great deal of ground, and if you have written a number of papers in your program somewhat related, then you may have a very wide range of “stuff” you have written regarding your paper. The natural (albeit wrong) tendency for the doctoral candidate writing a dissertation is to include it all. After all, it’s your dissertation. It’s supposed to be long, so put EVERYTHING in there. The result is a chapter that is a mile wide, an inch deep, and downright painful to read. One of the most difficult things you will have to do in your writing process is to delete chunks of text from your dissertation. Whatever you include should be essential. It should serve a critical purpose in proportion to a need.

3. Letting the sources drive the organization of the chapter
When you are working on your literature review, you are surrounded by sources – articles, books, web sites, etc. When your world is surrounded by sources, it is easy to become driven by those sources. After all, if you are taking notes as you read, those notes are typically organized according to the sources. Unfortunately, some students then write their literature reviews as if they are a series of sources – not an organized body of information written in a way to serve a purpose. These papers start with important work, “Smith, Jones, and Campbell (1999) state. . . . “ and then moves from that study to another and another. Often these literature reviews read more like annotated bibliographies than papers. The ideas – the reason why the student is writing – is lost in the midst of the sources.

4. Lack of growth and development
This concern is related to the third concern, but it involves more than merely organizing according to sources. Some students can move beyond the sources and organize according to ideas, but those ideas serve no purpose in relation to one another. They are just categories – chunks – a way to put in a lot of stuff from all those old papers. Before, during, and after you write your literature review, you need to outline it and justify the categories and their relationships with one another. If there isn’t a deliberate rationale for what is included, what is excluded, and why things are written in the order in which they are, then you have not developed an acceptable literature review.

5. Lack of voice/authority
You may manage to read a lot of relevant research and you may have even developed an effective organization that helps your idea grow and develop, and yet something is still missing. Often when students work on their literature reviews, they are trying to include as much as possible and do it in a short timeframe so they can get to the real work of collecting data and getting done. Just as you have to be versed in any theory you use, you must also be grounded in the research. You have to know it well enough to represent the work with confidence and authority. Voice in writing is an achievement. You have to determine how you will “know” the research you are using. Typically, the faster and the shorter distance between your reading/note taking and your writing of your paper the less voice you achieve. You need to think about the work, think about it in relation to other work you are reading, and then think about it in relation to your line of inquiry. How can you create that space in which the work resonates and congeals in your mind? It may be a physical process as well as a mental one. For example, when I am developing the literature review for a new line of inquiry, I will shift from note-taking on the computer to using a fountain pen and composition notebooks to explore the nuances and connections between the work. It physically changes how I manipulate the information and this also pushes how I intellectually wrestle with the work. 

Grounding and Organization are Key 
Having a strong sense of your line of inquiry will help you narrow your scope for your literature review. One way to see that you are keeping your literature on target is to develop a diagram with the problem/question in the center and show how the literature review relates to it. Further, you can visually represent the degree of attention given to each sub-topic to see that it is an appropriate proportion – not just “big” because you had a lot of “stuff” related to it. Before you submit your chapter two, you need to go back and write an outline based on what is there, and make sure you can justify that organization.