15 Writing a Literature Review: Overcoming Challenges

Literature reviews are often the source of a lot of anxiety for graduate students – they can seem overwhelming, and the expectations for what should be accomplished can be ambiguous. The concept of “the literature review” itself is likely intimidating for graduate students, in part, because of the connotations the different parts of this title evoke when placed together.  First, “the” erroneously signifies that your literature review is one standalone thing, as opposed to something that is integrated and referred to throughout the entire thesis or article. A literature review should not simply be a separate piece completed at the beginning of the research/writing process and then only marginally edited at the end.

Second, the statement “the literature” also carries a potentially intimidating air about it. Literature signifies something of high culture and pretentious importance – impossible to attain, broad in scope, and just frustratingly out of reach.

Finally, “review” gives off the assumption that the reviewer is in the position of a passive audience member who looks on from the outside at all that is going on in the “literature” – not much activity or agency in this positioning.

In accomplishing this task, grad students are often warned against simply “summarizing” a series of books and articles, but what it means to interact and bring together literatures in a “critical” manner is sometimes not well instructed.

Researchers may wonder:

• Where do I start?
• What do I include vs. exclude?
• How do I insert myself into the literature review?
• Do I have anything to contribute?
• How do I organize large bodies of literature?
• How do I negotiate power relations and complexities?
• Who do I engage with vs. ignore?

Complete the following reflection exercise to think about how you perceive literature reviews.

Note: this activity is accessible via the web version of this OER but not via the PDF version. The questions posed are:

1. When you think of doing a literature review, what is it like for you? What image or metaphor comes to mind?
2. How is the literature represented? What image or metaphor comes to mind?
3. What is the researcher doing? What image or metaphor comes to mind?
4. How powerfully is the researcher represented? What image or metaphor comes to mind?

When Kamler and Thomson asked graduate students the questions in the above reflection activity, students produced some interesting responses. Graduate students conceptualized the literature as “a chaotic whirlpool,” “an ocean full of sharks”, or a “stormy ocean.”  Likewise, students conceptualized the researcher as “trying to swim with concrete blocks on my feet,” “tossed between currents in the sea, all pulling in different directions”, or “trying to persuade an octopus into a glass.” ^[1]

Do any of these sound like your own reflections? All of these metaphors speak to a common feeling of being lost, overwhelmed, drowning, and powerless. The obstacle is large and unruly, and the researcher is active, struggling, plugging along, and doing what needs to be done in the face of this huge task.