Reviewing the Lit Review

This morning I’ve spent time going through blog posts I’d come across previously – Pat Thomson {Patter} from the Faculty of Education, University of Nottingham, UK. She writes about the PhD process and product. I’ve pulled out several pertinent articles about topics that caught my interests and ended up digging more deeply into the Literature Review. There is a collection of all her blog posts about this topic gather in a Wakelet [Working with Literatures – aka the literature review].

From this collection I’ve gleaned several tips to keep in mind as I begin:

• ask the right questions – ask it in different locations (in case filter bubbles block or limit your results), ask in different combinations, have a savvy searcher show you how, record these questions and search activities to learn from the process [Putting the Search into Research – Starting the PhD]
• keep track of your search activity – record the key information you’ve found, from which data bases, key words used, search parameters imposed, search results and insights or next options to try. [Literature Review step one – scoping]
• take notes for each article or book in 3-4 sentences; answer key questions such as field, topic, definition, concepts, kind, categorizations, connections; say it succinctly, don’t copy the piece but identify it’s arguments. [Beginning the Literature Review – taking notes] [How to read and note an academic book, part two – slicing and dicing]
• review your lit review to make sure it meets the criteria for systematic thought – using the Unsworth’s ‘scholarly primitives’ checklist. These include discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating and finally representing. [A Lit Review Thinking Tool]
• look for categories and patterns to connect reading to thinking – similarities & differences (my thoughts connect to my current tagging practices) [Doing the Literature Review – Thinking about patterns and groups]
• read, read and read some more – map things out, examine pertinence, balance the ‘currency‘ (age of the articles), make it matter (contributes to the field, building your ‘warrant’) [Why do Doctoral Researchers Get Asked to Read So Much?] [The literature review – how old are the sources?]
• avoid creating a ‘laundry list’ when collecting, curating and writing about the articles – your Lit Review is not to prove you’ve read them but to manage your argument, write with ‘authority’ and highlight important works. [Avoiding the laundry list literature review]
• frame your argument and lit review paragraphs into a claim, evidence, conclusion structure to avoid the laundry list name game [Literature know-how: beware too much naming, not enough framing]
• there are 5 ways to structure, 5 traditional reviews, and two basic types of lit reviews. The two types are systematic and traditional.
  • five traditional lit reviews include conceptual, state-of-the-art, expert, scoping, and traditional review – purpose matters in what type of lit review you do [Not all literature reviews are the same]
  • five ways to structure include chronology, major themes, canon/classical, the wheel, and the pyramid [Five ways to structure a lit review]

This is just the beginning of my reading and reviewing as I begin to dig into what my PhD will focus on, where I’ll begin and how I’ll capture what I’m doing as it do it!