Dear Colleagues,
On several occasions, people have asked me why I place so much emphasis on the literature and the literature review. The most recent series of queries came in off-list comments since Tuesday when I posted the excellent Demystify Your Thesis book by Ron Adams to my Academia.edu page in the "Teaching Documents" section. (The book is posted with permission, and it will remain on my site. It has been downloaded 277 times since Tuesday — you are welcome to use it, and you have permission to share it with others.)
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.
In most fields, there is a genre of journal article that is nearly missing from the literature of design research — the literature review. This is quite distinct from the literature review chapter of the PhD thesis, though the literature review chapter in design is typically a weak point in the thesis. (There are exceptions — I have been reading an exemplary literature review by one current PhD student that is a masterful overview of her field. This chapter is so good that she will get a solid journal article from it as a stand-alone publication.)
I won't describe the issues in full. Two years ago, in June 2011, Victor Margolin posted a terrific note to the list on what he calls intertextuality, the conversation among authors over years, decades, or even centuries that builds a field. 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.
For now, I am writing to say that I am posting a useful article to my Academia.edu page on writing a literature review by Jane Webster and Richard Watson from 2002. It appeared in the journal MISQ, 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.
This is a time-limited opportunity. I will remove the Webster & Watson article from the Academia.edu page in one week, on July 11.
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|