Hi All,

(sorry long post)
As someone who works with one toe in the academic world as a visiting and adjunct professor at a number of universities, but with most of my toes in the independent, not for profit, research, advocacy and consulting world, I have a rather different view of literature reviews. But I suspect that it may have some relevance to phd design students, some of whom I have had the pleasure of supervising.

From my perspective, the thread on literacy, endnotes, and social networks has been too preoccupied with plumbing and not enough with sources and filtering. 
(BTW, on the matter of plumbing, I have been using Bookends for many years as my software of choice, but it works on the Mac only, so not much use to pc users.)

To begin with, I don't think the notion of literacy is helpful in this area, any more than it is helpful in the wider society. To understand why I think this is the case would take much longer than I have time for at the moment, and it may not be of interest to many on this list. To those of you who are interested, I give a url below to a review I wrote of an Australian literacy survey that gives a sense of my concerns. To summarise those concerns, I think that standard notions of literacy put the onus on individuals rather than on communities of practice. What results is a notion of a literacy deficiency in individuals. It's an example of blaming the victim. 

Having said that, I hope there is a recognised need within the community of practice that is phd supervisors and phd candidates to have a rigorous and shared set of procedures and practices for undertaking literature reviews. This is what forms a large part of what Ken has been articulating masterfully in the earlier threads. But, without in any way wishing to denigrate this vital part of doing a literature review, I would suggest that this is all about plumbing. Now, plumbing is vital. We have to get that right before we can move onto the other stuff. And the quality of plumbing needs to be both maintained and improved. Moreover, as Terry suggests, many of our contemporary plumbing tools make life a lot easier. Gone are the boxes of cards, scribbled notes, and endless photocopies, all of which had to be laboriously transcribed, typed and checked for consistency using arcane bibliographic styles. Now we press a few buttons and out comes the clean digitised water from the digital pipes.

That is when the real work of doing a CRITICAL literature review begins. I emphasise the word 'critical' because I think it is vital to distinguish between a literature review that simply summarises what has been done in the past and possibly classifies it according to explicit criteria, and a critical literature review that filters what has been found in new and interesting ways. The former is plumbing, the latter is filtering.

I don't think Victor's original post was really about plumbing, I think it was about two inter-related matters that sit beyond the plumbing.

In the first instance it was about the reservoirs of knowledge and know-how which we draw on for our water and in the second instance it was to do with the filtering that goes on once we turn on the tap.

What I think rightly disturbs Victor is the stagnant pools from which some people draw on in their investigation of our fields, missing some of glorious fresh water lakes because they are outside their own professionally approved territory. 

To give you concrete sense of this, I will draw from my own experience. Back in the mid sixties I started taking an interest in symbol design. With a background in psychology, my first port of call was psychology abstracts. I diligently (manually) trawled through the entire series from the 19th Century through to the (then) present day. I found very little, and what I did find was not very useful. Had I stuck to that area I could have concluded that I was the first person on earth to consider this matter as worthy of research. I made further searches in the peer reviewed, published research, in many other fields and found nothing that helped. However, once I looked beyond this narrow literature, I discovered a great deal of thinking, ideas and practical investigation in all sorts of matters that had a bearing on my interest. I particularly remember coming across the Design Methods Group and Bruce Archer's work at the RCA. I was also particularly struck by the work which began in the German Bauhaus, later the New Bauhaus and ULM. None of this important work nor its craft antecedents featured in the peer reviewed research literature. By accident I came across Visible Language, then the Journal of Typographic Research, and that opened up another rich vain of ideas, thinking and research. By the time I had completed my preliminary work, I realised that I was a small and relatively new contributor to a large field of interest with many points of view, paradigms and purposes. In order to make progress, I had to develop a set of criteria—filters, if you like—that I could apply to this literature. This is the really hard and important work of doing critical literature reviews.

More recently I have had a lot to do with designing medicine information. Here I observe a narrowness of reviewing by Medicos who take an interest in this area, that would alarm Victor even more than the circumstances  that gave rise to his current concern. Reading some of this work reminds me of my days rummaging around in psych abstracts. From my current perspective, as an information designer, having developed a set of criteria (filters) that I apply to reading research, I have yet to come across a single paper in the standard peer reviewed medical research literature that can usefully enhance my knowledge of designing medicine information. This is not surprising since the authors of these articles draw only on the peer reviewed medical literature and do not stray into such fields as usability, design methods, document design, information design, typography, etc, let alone into work outside the peer reviewed journals and other sources.

Thus I think the important issues for reviewers of any field to consider is first, which of the many bodies water (knowledge) they should dip into, and why; and second, what filtering (criteria) they should apply at the other end. All the rest is plumbing done (we hope) to a high professional standard.

Those who are relatively new to our many fields of design knowledge, need to realise that most of what we know by way of methods and practices, lies outside the peer reviewed research literature to which our digital plumbing is connected, and will probably never be connected into that plumbing system. I'm thinking here particularly, though not exclusively of the vast body of research by design, that suffuses our activities.

(sorry for the long rant)

David

a reference on literacy studies
http://communication.org.au/publications/reviews/The-literacy-environment--a-critical-review-of-ABS--039-s-1996-report-on-literacy-in-Australia/42,32.html

an example of a critical literature review
http://www.communication.org.au/http/usable_medicines_information.pdf
-- 

blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au

Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
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