 |
 |
Dear colleagues, There are so many wonderful posts and ideas in this thread. I appreciate the time and expertise vested in this initiative, the knowledge sharing, and the new horizons that are charted. I just want to share a few ideas in relation to the current thread on literature reviews. I regret I cannot put more time to organize my post and to go more consistent. Our colleagues already mentioned that the literature review builds up personal professional knowledge base and expertise. No need to invent the wheel. Let's use other people ideas as stepping stones and get a level higher than they did. We need a personal knowledge base to relate better with our professional community knowledge base and discourse. The literature review is a tradition. In this respect, it is important to analyze its niche through the lenses of the function and dialectics of tradition and innovation. There is a lot of controversy here. If we break from tradition very fast, we risk to lose our good ways and get messed in our new inconsistent practices. If we keep with tradition very religiously, we risk to advance very slow. We risk to miss major innovation stepping stones. The formalization of the literature review is a time-consuming process. It might divert resources from more interesting projects. Very often the formalization of this information might require a lot of work in order to prevent mishaps and tedious factual errors. I can see why many people feel uncomfortable with a very strict policy on literature reviews. The importance of the formal literature review varies across disciplines and paradigms. The literature review also informs paper reviewers about the depth of knowledge that the author has developed. It is a formal indicator, but very often helps to pull the red flags. About different types of literacies. This is a broad topic. Like different intelligences. In our context, we can treat the literature review problem from various paradigmatic points and will get different types of reviews. There are a number of scholarly community that do not require and do not write literature review sections in their papers (but do it in dissertations). The key word again is "paradigm." Thank you for attention, Lubomir