Writing Literature Reviews

Author: Stephen J. Turnbull
Organization: Faculty of Engineering, Information, and Systems at the University of Tsukuba
Contact: Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
Date: November 28, 2019
Copyright: 2019, Stephen J. Turnbull
Topic:Research

Writing a literature survey is an art. A well-written survey helps to convince your audience of you competence and that you deserve their attention. (This is mostly for an audience of readers -- it's hard to do a good survey in the amount of time generally allocated for an oral presentation).

Purposes of literature review (also, literature survey):

  1. Comparison to author's research for originality
  2. Prepare author in breadth and depth for Q&A

The purpose of comparison is clear I think (but feel free to ask questions!). Breadth and depth are more complicated.

How broad does the literature review need to be?

Reading for your literature review should help prepare you for the following topics:

  1. What is the background and significance of this research theme? How does your research advance its objectives?
  2. What research obstacles does your methodology help to overcome?
  3. What theories (models) have been used to understand this research theme? How does your model relate to them, and how is it original? Why did you choose it?
  4. What is your data source, if an empirical research? What kind of data would be needed to confirm your theory, if pure theory?
  5. What kinds of analysis of similar research problems have been used, including narrative, logical, mathematical, and statistical methods? Why did you choose the kind of analysis you conducted?

What does "depth" in a literature review mean?

Depth means being able to trace your research agenda to its "roots", for each of the topics in "Breadth". By "agenda" I mean a line of development, a series of related research questions that build on each other, and are developed in a collection of research papers that (usually) cite each other.

  1. The root of a research agenda is usually the "textbook treatment" of the area.

    You may, but don't necessarily need to, cite an actual textbook. For the master level, it's generally a good idea. Doctoral dissertations usually trace development of their research area back to seminal papers preceding the textbooks, and so often do not mention textbooks.

  2. The agenda itself is frequently generated by a "seminal paper" which makes a clear break from the textbook treatment, for the purpose of this research area.

    Seminal papers can usually be recognized as the target of a cluster of citations, and by the fact that in a series where Paper A cites Paper B which cites Paper C, all of them cite Paper 0 (the seminal paper).

  3. Other papers you should cite are those with clarify the agenda or generate research questions whose answers are needed to define your own research question. Some of these may also be seminal.

Organizing your literature review

Typically you will take an historical perspective on the literature survey, and so generally will cover each topic a, b, c, d, e in that order. Then each topic generally is treated in the order 1, 2, 3 above.

Note that although typically a single popular textbook will cover all of the topics a - e in "Breadth", it is rare that any single paper will serve to define a stage in the research agenda for all of them. It's also rare that you need to cite completely different sets of papers for each topic in "Breadth", because methodological and analytical innovations are frequently driven by the need to address new data or research questions.