Thread by @raulpacheco

Mini-thread on writing literature reviews and having them as assignments. I am bewildered by the lack of guidance on "how to conduct a literature review" all over the place. And yes, I've read books that are specifically on the literature review. I think this stems from...

... something I identified in an earlier thread and blog post - our students are EXPECTED to know how to do something, when nobody has taught them explicitly what it looks like, how to do it. raulpacheco.org/2018/04/on-the… unless you've taught someone how to do a LR, you can't expect it

I have an entire page on Literature Reviews raulpacheco.org/resources/lite… I also discuss the different scholarly products that you can generate (annotated bibliographies, Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump tables, banks of rhetorical precis, etc.) each of these is a different product

... as a result, the process to generate each one of them is distinct / I have written on how to generate an annotated bibliography raulpacheco.org/2017/04/writin… which is the first step I would expect anybody unfamiliar with LRs would do, just as a matter of training. BUT I also ask...

... of my thesis students and research assistants that they generate a Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump #CSED / I do this because it helps ME and THEM get a bird's eye view of which sources they've looked at and what they've learned from each raulpacheco.org/2016/06/synthe…

I did write a blog post outlining step-by-step how I do literature reviews raulpacheco.org/2017/04/how-to… and some of the most frequent questions I get asked by my students and RAs - I explain to them the different scholarly products I usually generate raulpacheco.org/2017/01/litera…

BUT, and this is the really weird thing about literature reviews: in many ways, they're very idiosincratic, and so is the process of generating them. I follow a very systematic approach to mapping a new body of literature raulpacheco.org/2018/01/mappin… not everyone does it like I do it.

Generally, I find that where students lack guidance is:

a) what is a LR?
b) how many sources?
c) how do I read/annotate/synthesize
d) what do you expect me to write (headings, sub headings, topics to cover)
e) when is a LR finished?

All of these have idiosincratic responses

So, if I were a faculty member asking for a LR, I would provide guidance on the questions I previously mentioned, in a document/handout.

Because only YOU know exactly how you want the LR done, particularly if it is a work package (e.g. you have an RA doing a lit review).

I think we ought to be explicit about what exactly we want from students and research assistants, and our preferred way of doing things, because sadly there is no standard operating procedure for this.

Same with the doctoral dissertation, or with any thesis.

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Follow-up micro-thread with a quick example. Two of my doctoral students study water conflicts, as does one of my Masters students. This is an area where I have published extensively and done fieldwork. I gave them PDFs of my articles to read and check the references.

One of my (already graduated) doctoral students wanted to include a water-mining conflict in his dissertation. I don't study mining (I took courses during my Masters, but I'm not familiar with the literature). BUT I knew mining and water conflict scholarship existed on Peru.

I remembered Fabiana Li (University of Manitoba), Marcela Torres Wong (FLACSO Mexico) and Rutgerd Boelens (UVA NL) had all published on mining conflicts in Peru and water. I ran a quick Google Scholar search scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&… I asked my student to do citation tracing

Once he had read some of that work, I asked him to do forward and backward citation tracing until he reached some key authors on water and mining IN MEXICO (I know Aleida Azamar Alonso from UAM has published extensively on mining, but not so much on water). And so on...

From there I asked him to check patterns and themes in his literature review:
a) how do conflicts emerge?
b) how different are the factors that drive water conflict and mining conflict?
c) when are conflicts DUE to water and when are they COLLATERAL to water?
d) Empirical cases.

With my graduate and undergraduate students, when I ask them to review the literature, I offer:
a) Key authors
b) Suggestions of keywords to search in databases
c) Links to my blog posts on how to do each step of the process
d) Sample questions/themes to expand on.

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NEW BLOG POST: Writing a literature review assignment (and for instructors: providing guidance) buff.ly/2ZPIulO this thread, but in handy blog post format with additional notes. #AcWri #PhDChat