How the Purpose of the Literature Review Affects How You Write It

Which is harder? Assembling the literature review for your dissertation or assembling the literature review for your journal article?

Have you ever struggled with trying to assemble a literature review section? For your dissertation, you might be overwhelmed by the large number of papers in your discipline that you feel that you need to address. James Hayton elaborates nicely on some of those issues over here. For your journal article, you might be struggling with what to include and exclude, knowing that it needs to be much shorter than your dissertation.

Perhaps the first question to ask yourself when you are struggling is, “What is the purpose of this literature review?”

You mean, there’s a purpose? Isn’t it self-evident from the title: Literature Review?

Well, yes and no.

For your dissertation or thesis — a document that only a handful of people will likely read — the literature review is to demonstrate that you know the broader context for your discipline and how your specific work fits into this big scheme. This broad knowledge (as written in your dissertation) demonstrates to your thesis committee that you know your stuff. As a result, parts of your literature review may read and function like a tutorial on some broad themes in your discipline. You will likely also be expected to cover quite a bit of the field in your literature synthesis, amounting to perhaps 10, 20, or more pages of your dissertation.

In a journal article, however, if you even have a separate section called Literature Review, the presentation must be concise and focused. The goal in your paper is not to demonstrate your knowledge in a broad sense – or even in a narrow sense – but to demonstrate how your research article fits into the existing literature. Does it fill a gap in our understanding? Does it resolve two competing hypotheses for how something works? What new science are you presenting?

The problem with many journal articles is that the authors apply the same approach that worked well for them in writing their dissertations. That simply won’t do. Not only does this delay the presentation of the most interesting part of the paper for the reader (the results!), but it adds unnecessary length to the article that many readers will be familiar with.

So, as I hope you now have an appreciation for, even though we use the same term Literature Review for a dissertation or journal article, they really have separate purposes.

[Readers of Eloquent Science will know that I recommend use of the term literature synthesis instead of literature review, partly to avoid authors falling in the trap of not synthesizing their results and instead producing a laundry list of papers: “This paper did this. This paper did that. Blah, blah, blah.”]

This blog post today was inspired by reading Rankin’s The Work of Writing: Insights and Strategies for Academics and Professionals [Book] [Kindle].