Dear Colleagues,
Last week, I posted a useful article to my Academia.edu page on writing a literature review by Jane Webster and Richard Watson from 2002. This was a time-limited opportunity. I will remove the Webster and Watson article from the Academia.edu tomorrow, on July 11.
The article, originally from the journal MISQ, is titled "Analyzing the Past to Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review."
To get a copy, go to my Academia.edu page,
http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Click on the section for "Teaching Documents." The article is at the bottom of the page.
Typically, the literature review remains weak in our field, both within the PhD thesis and in the general literature of the field. For those who want to consider the issues, I recommend an excellent thread from PhD-Design that began in June 2011. It began when Victor Margolin posted a terrific note to the list on intertextuality, the conversation among authors that builds a field over years, decades, or even centuries. I responded with a post titled "Literacy." A thread followed. You can follow the thread on the list archive for June 2011. Start on June 26. Or use the search engine connected to the PhD-Design home page. Put the word _ Literacy _ in the Subject: header and go back to June 2011 in the list.
With respect to the literature review in the PhD thesis, Ron Adam's book Demystify Your Thesis explains well how using the literature sets the frame for a strong thesis, allowing the PhD student to identify a knowledge gap, represent the current situation with a field, and position his or her own contribution. The Adams book also appears in the "Teaching Documents" section of my Academia.edu page. (The book is posted with permission, and it will remain on my site. It has been downloaded 385 times since last week. You are welcome to use it, copy it, teach from it, and you have permission to share it.)
Literature review is vital to the development of most fields — the art of literature review helps us to know what we know as a field, it helps us to learn what we do not know, and it helps us to establish gaps. These gaps include discovering that we do not know that we don't know something, and it helps us to identify cases where bringing information together reveals that we know something of which we were not aware.
The Webster and Watson article focuses on a genre of journal article that is quite distinct from the literature review chapter of the PhD thesis. It would be great to see more literature review articles in our journals — for those who conduct research, the literature review helps to build the future of our field. I'd also suggest that you share this article with PhD students — a strong literature review chapter in a thesis can be developed into a literature review article for a good journal, and this can be a good way for a young researcher to make his or her first mark in the larger field. In many fields, it is common for literature review articles to be highly cited. For some examples in different fields that show the usage given to literature review articles, put the words [ Literature Review ] in the search box of Google Scholar. Nearly everyone in a field reads them because they offer an effective way to stay updated on issues and concepts in the current literature. Since many writers draw on these articles as a starting point or a reference point, they are highly cited and they can make the author of a solid literature review quite well known.
Again to get a copy of Webster and Watson, go to my Academia.edu page,
http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Click on the section for "Teaching Documents." The article is at the bottom of the page.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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