Vlog 70 - A stroppy professor's guide to literature reviews

hello i'm cha Ramazan i'm the dean of graduate research at as University and welcome to blogeee 70 well 70 the strawberry professors guide to the literature review and yet I have a confession to make I hate literature reviews I find them pedantic I find them boring and yes I find them pedestrian but I'm really fortunate because in the field in which I work they stand alone chapter that is a literature review is incredibly rare in my fields we have an integrated literature review and just so you know of the hundreds of PhDs that I've examined not one of them none of them have had a standalone chapter that's titled literature review now I'm just starting this vlog with these facts because it seems a bit startling to a lot of people often when I say those facts in Australia people end up with their mouths open like and I just want to remind people that there's lots of different ways of organizing knowledge lots of different ways of confirming originality but often in Australia the commitment to the self-standing literature review appears almost evangelical so there are lots of different ways in which you can organize your research I've already talked about the strategy that's most common in my field and that is the integrated literature review so your thesis or indeed your book or indeed your refereed article have a series of headings and as part of that integrated in with the rest of the argument and debate is the literature review so it's certainly not a self-standing chapter really matters really interesting so I just want to raise that because there are lots of different ways in which we can configure a PhD lots of different ways in which we can structure our knowledge and I think that's always been my worry with the phrase research training the phrase research training is relatively new 15 years ago it was very rarely mentioned but research training as it's currently configured so often looks like we're painting by numbers so do this do that do that do that and you've got yourself a literature review well you know what research by its very definition is filled with surprises it's not predictable every search was predictable then we wouldn't be doing it so I really want to talk today about the importance of enlivening your literature review and exploring really fresh relationships between form and content and your content in context so I'm providing ten quick tips for you if you do want to write that standalone chapter that is a literature review that's great that is your choice most people do in contemporary Australia and so let me provide ten very quick tips to ensure it's sharp it's edgy and the most important thing that I want for you is and this is just offering an examiner's perspective on this I'm trying to avoid your poor examiner reading your literature review paragraph after paragraph after paragraph and basically saying please please please when will this chapter ever end and trust me examiner's do do that so Tyra's tip 1 remember that the literature review is a frame it must have an organizing principle so literature reviews are not obviously the review of everything that's ever been written on a topic through time what it must do is provide the organizing principle for your PhD and what that means is it must provide the foundation and the frame to confirm your original contribution to knowledge that is its job so remember and this is the first big truth here remember be very clear what is included in your literature review and what is excluded in your literature review and state that overtly on first page open your chapter state clearly this is the area I'm investigating these are the areas of literature I am NOT investigating and why and that protects you because it means the examiner can't say well you didn't address these issues you can say I didn't address those issues I stated that vertically in my literature review and there are the reasons why I didn't go into those areas important to always hold on to the purpose of a literature review in the context of your thesis or your research project what I say to my students and anyone else asks for advice on this topic is really clear before you start reading and certainly before you start writing I want you to sit down and write one sentence one sentence what are you hoping to get out of this literature review what is the point of this literature review in the context of your thesis in the context of your research so what are you looking for what are the imperatives of this literature review to enliven your PhD at a wonderful student I was talking with a couple of weeks ago who's doing a great PhD on health literacy great area exam it myself wonderful and he realized tragically after spending some weeks during his literature review but actually he was focusing on all these other areas and the key bit of the literature review is actually the phrase health literacy health literacy is defined differently around the world at the moment the North American definition of health literacy is tending to dominate and wash out and wipe out other definitions that actually may be better and more effective to enable research so it suddenly realized the organizing principle of his literature review needed to be conceptual around the phrase health literacy so just make sure in one sentence you actually know what you're doing you know what the point of this literature search actually is three you had one job so the point of a literature review is actually one job you have one job in the PhD and that is you are finding a gap in the literature literature reviews in the rest of your research life may have different priorities and imperatives but for a PhD a literature review is locating a gap and that is the gap that you'll be filling through your research your PhD is about finding an original contribution to knowledge and then these blogs I use that plate a lot because that's the point that's what you're doing if you're not finding an original contribution to knowledge then you're not doing a PhD so the easiest way to fail a PhD is to assume that you've made an original contribution to knowledge rather than proving that you've made an original contribution to knowledge maybe your examiner's know the field that's why they are examiner's so if you are stating at some point in your PhD this is low regional contribution to knowledge and your examiner's know that an article was written in 1984 that actually had already found that original contribution to knowledge they are going to call you out on that so the point of a PhD is to show your wares and to confirm that you know the field so well that you've been able to pinpoint the gap into which your thesis can be situated for remember to be accurate and rigorous a very important part of what we are examining in a PhD is your capacity to abide by and demonstrate academic protocols and academic literacies so please make short please that your note taking is immaculate your note taking must be rigorous and clear to enable your referencing as you come to write the PhD remember your thesis is going to go through Turnitin and Turnitin reports you know I'm very interested in not necessarily software or hardware but wetware but the one thing that Turnitin reports do reveal very very clearly is when the paraphrasing that you've supposedly been enacting all of a sudden as a direct quote so in a Turnitin report you can see when bad note-taking has taken place and the student has inverted commas paraphrased when it's actually a direct quotation so remember use good note-taking and ensure your academic protocols are in place because one truth here whenever we've got a problem with plagiarism that's revealed by Turnitin or other means invariably it comes from the literature review chapter okay five big one you are reading for interpretation and not for fact so make sure when everything that you're reading you ask yourself why you're not reporting facts you are reporting interpretation I'll say that again you're not reporting facts you're reporting interpretation so literature reviews are actually not about facts they're about the interpretation to that fact six well so important please make sure that your literature review is integrated and not fragmented the important part of a literature review I think probably killed the most complicated and important paragraphs that you write in a PhD are the introduction and the conclusion to a literature review because they must guide your reader seamlessly through the debate as all about smooth movements smooth between sections between topics between writers between ideas so many literature reviews I read are so incredibly dull because it's one damn paragraph after another there's not a lot of relationships between those paragraphs it's just pedantic I feel life leaving me as I read some of these literature reviews so please remember integrate integrate integrate seven be prepared to go meta love going meta meta analysis is the higher analysis meta is above so when you can reflect on the big picture that is the best literature of you too often literature reviews become this paragraph after paragraph after paragraph dealing with my new show but actually this is a PhD and we need to see if you can do the top order thinking go meta see the big picture engage the small scholar and go to the small article walk but show the meta components the bigger component that derives from that smaller point so it is very important in a literature review that you prove to your examiner that you can manage the higher order of analysis don't focus on the what focus on the why why was that book written why was that study undertaken how were the methods without effective methods with a really bit dodgy methods were they claiming causality when really it was a correlation so go meta as much as you can also is important to think about your own historical positioning and the historical positioning of the scholars that you are deploying and the studies that you are reporting because your positioning in time and space is different from that of your researchers that you are exploring and sighting and probing so do talk about how those contextual shifts are transforming your study right 8 oh yeah understand the difference between a literature review and a systematic review now as we all know I hope they're very different things literature reviews systematic reviews and we'll talk about a systematic review in 10 seconds but what I would say I'm increasingly seeing is people start out with the best will of the world to write a systematic review and because they can't sustain it because it has particular characteristics they sort of end up writing a sort of pretty bad literature review that was trying to be a systematic review and ended up being neither so please make a decision call it and write that so where we see the systematic review is particularly in the Health Sciences so nursing midwifery allied health a little bit in paramedicine I would like to see a little bit more person that where you tend to see it is these new and emerging disciplines and paradigms show a history of very small studies that have the whole series of design flaws if you will and we're really not representative in any form so very small studies and a lot of them so how exactly do we link those small studies together and what do they prove so we have to try and find a way to manage the lack of representative studies and indeed the lack of causality so the systematic review searches for papers systematically on a particular topic so for example some of the best ways in which I see a systematic review operate is to great once I've read recently actually the causes of breast cancer in a 40 year old women in Tasmania great topic to do a literature review on a great Tori to do a systematic review on and the other one is two that I'm working with one of our great students at the moment at Flinders the best strategies for speech therapy for students with autism in regional and remote Australia so you can see they are very tightly constituted topics so this means that on these very tight topics you're able to assess the papers in that particular area and assess them by the same criteria so you're able to evaluate them through a very prescriptive framework so you can create a tight and effective mechanism to evaluate the value in each paper the systematic reviews are particularly good if lots of different designs research designs have been used or they're just simply no your partners to the research that is being instigated systematic reviews are great at finding patterns also they resolve a conflict in the literature really effectively so if you're working in a field where there's one big divide so lots of studies have been done small unrepresentative but they're finding completely radically different things and then a systematic review can start to work out what exactly has gone on in that field so I do recommend them and I say the often used as I've said in Health Sciences I wish they were used particularly in early childhood research because so many of the early years early learning scholarship that exists at the moment are again dealing with very very small studies some of the designs are pretty woolly if I'm being kind and I really think there might be a moment dealing with early childhood research where the systematic review might be useful so we'll talk about that for the guys and gals out there looking at the early years and early years learning okay to nine number nine don't forget the value of theory theory is the why of knowledge lower order thinking focuses on the what and the how of knowledge so theory is the key moment in the construction of knowledge so please have a theoretical awareness as you move through your literature review you all know how horrified I am at the idea that there is also like a a theory chapter there's a literature review chapter and there is a theory chapter like the rest of the thesis is not theory that of course in fact well that is empiricism and that's a problem so try as best you can to a line of pistil knology ontology and methodology if you're doing that well and you see those relationships you're doing fantastically 10 use signposts in your literature review big tip for putters literature reviews when they are a self-standing chapter really must be organized with great effectiveness they must be structured will and the sections really matter so what I recommend when I'm talking to students about creating a good literature review in this way is a self-standing chapter I remind them the literature review is the spine of your thesis like the spine of the body it is the spine of your thesis it is holding everything together and make sure that your project is standing upright and facing the world so when you're writing your look to review you might want to have a lot of heading so put in a hell of a lot of headings on the way through because they're acting like vertebrae so when you're just starting your literature review put in lots and lots and lots of headings lots and lots and lots of vertebrae and as you start to write through the literature find the patterns the links the relationships you'll find you'll be able to remove many may most of those headings and the spine will still be upright for you but at the start do feel comfortable putting in lots of headings to signpost your journey through knowledge now knowledge can be really boring but really it doesn't have to be I always say enliven your research and liven it by showing how much you know and your confidence and your competence with the work of others remember you are proving originality here because you are fabulous you've read the field you know the field you respect the field but you are building on it and that's why you're a fantastic PhD student so I hope you will from stroppy tower this week I wish you love light and peace keep

Channel: Office of Graduate Research Flinders University

Views: 15,913

Rating: 4.9841585 out of 5

Keywords: Tara Brabazon, Literature Reviews, Doctor of Philosophy, PhD organization, original contribution to knowledge, systematic review

Id: SejiQu-PtMI

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2017