We do truly wish we could tell you about a reliable or simple way to make sense of the literature. We can say, however, that you need to attend to things at two levels: • One is establishing a system that will allow you to organise the hard copies of the articles etc., and develop a data base for references, so you have easy access under relevant categories and don't chase the same references repeatedly. • The other is the more demanding task of understanding and using the literature for your purposes. Without attending to the first task, you could easily become inefficient and frustrated. However, although it is necessary to have some way of keeping track, don't spend all your energies on perfecting your system. It may be a good idea to attend a course for researchers on handling information. Check whether your university's library or computer centre offers such a course.
The other task ahead of you - of understanding, reviewing and using the literature for your purposes - goes to the heart of your thesis. We consider this in three stages.
Making sense of the literature - first pass When you first come to an area of research, you are filling in the background in a general way, getting a feel for the whole area, an idea of its scope, starting to appreciate the controversies, to see the high points, and to become more familiar with the major players. You need a starting point. This may come out of previous work you've done. If you're new to the area, your supervisor could suggest fruitful starting points. Or you could pursue some recent review articles to begin.
Too much to handle At this stage there seems to be masses of literature relevant to your research. Or you may worry that there seems to be hardly anything. As you read, think about and discuss articles and isolate the issues you're more interested in. In this way, you focus your topic more and more. The more you can close in on what your research question actually is, the more you will be able to have a basis for selecting the relevant areas of the literature. This is the only way to bring it down to a manageable size.
Very little there If initially you can't seem to find much at all on your research area - and you are sure that you've exploited all avenues for searching that the library can present you with - then there are a few possibilities: • You could be right at the cutting edge of something new and it's not surprising there's little around. • You could be limiting yourself to too narrow an area and not appreciating that relevant material could be just around the corner in a closely related field. • Unfortunately there's another possibility and this is that there's nothing in the literature because it is not a worthwhile area of research. In this case, you need to look closely with your supervisor at what it is you plan to do. Quality of the Literature This begins your first step in making sense of the literature. You are not necessarily closely evaluating it now; you are mostly learning through it. But, sometimes at this stage students do ask us how they can judge the quality of the literature they're reading, as they're not experts.
You learn to judge, evaluate, and look critically at the literature by judging, evaluating and looking critically at it.That is, you learn to do so by practising. There is no quick recipe for doing this but there are some questions you could find useful and, with practice, you will develop many others: • Is the problem clearly spelled out? • Are the results presented new? • Was the research influential in that others picked up the threads and pursued them? • How large a sample was used? • How convincing is the argument made? • How were the results analysed? • What perspective are they coming from? • Are the generalisations justified by the evidence on which they are made? • What is the significance of this research? • What are the assumptions behind the research? • Is the methodology well justified as the most appropriate to study the problem? • Is the theoretical basis transparent? In critically evaluating, you are looking for the strengths of certain studies and the significance and contributions made by researchers. You are also looking for limitations, flaws and weaknesses of particular studies, or of whole lines of enquiry.
Indeed, if you take this critical approach to looking at previous research in your field, your final literature review will not be a compilation of summaries but an evaluation. It will then reflect your capacity for critical analysis.
Making sense of the literature - second pass You continue the process of making sense of the literature by gaining more expertise which allows you to become more confident, and by being much more focused on your specific research.
You're still reading and perhaps needing to re-read some of the literature. You're thinking about it as you are doing your experiments, conducting your studies, analysing texts or other data. You are able to talk about it easily and discuss it. In other words, it's becoming part of you.
At a deeper level than before, • you are now not only looking at findings but are looking at how others have arrived at their findings; • you're looking at what assumptions are leading to the way something is investigated; • you're looking for genuine differences in theories as opposed to semantic differences; • you also are gaining an understanding of why the field developed in the way it did; • you have a sense for where it might be going. First of all you probably thought something like, "I just have to get a handle on this". But now you see that this 'handle' which you discovered for yourself turns out to be the key to what is important. You are very likely getting to this level of understanding by taking things to pieces and putting them back together.
For example, you may need to set up alongside one another four or five different definitions of the same concept, versions of the same theory, or different theories proposed to account for the same phenomenon. You may need to unpack them thoroughly, even at the very basic level of what is the implied understanding of key words (for example 'concept', 'model', 'principles' etc.), before you can confidently compare them, which you need to do before synthesis is possible.
Or, for example, you may be trying to sort through specific discoveries which have been variously and concurrently described by different researchers in different countries. You need to ask questions such as whether they are the same discoveries being given different names or, if they are not the same, whether they are related. In other words, you may need to embark on very detailed analyses of parts of the literature while maintaining the general picture.
Making sense of the literature - final pass You make sense of the literature finally when you are looking back to place your own research within the field. At the final pass, you really see how your research has grown out of previous work. So now you may be able to identify points or issues that lead directly to your research. You may see points whose significance didn't strike you at first but which now you can highlight. Or you may realise that some aspect of your research has incidentally provided evidence to lend weight to one view of a controversy. Having finished your own research, you are now much better equipped to evaluate previous research in your field.
From this point when you have finished your own research and you look back and fill in the picture, it is not only that you understand the literature and can handle it better, but you could also see how it motivates your own research. When you conceptualise the literature in this way, it becomes an integral part of your research.
