Cecile Badenhorst MA (UBC), PhD (Queen’s) is an Associate Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University. Her research interests are post-secondary, higher education and adult learning experiences, particularly graduate research writing, academic literacies and qualitative research methodologies. In this 2-part guest post she explains her approach to teaching postgraduates about literature reviews.
By Cecile Badenhorst
After many years of running workshops on “How to write literature reviews”, I realized that postgraduate students often left with a few useful tools but without that deep understanding of what was required. Without a doubt, the literature review is one of the most challenging genres students face. It is also one of the most challenging genres to teach. How do you explain in an hour or two a process that takes years of practice, feedback and revision to hone and refine? Recently, I conducted research on literature reviews with the specific aim of helping me to teach this genre to postgraduate students (Badenhorst, 2017; forthcoming). In this and the following blog post, I will explain what I’ve learned. In Part I, I’ll explain the useful tools and in Part II, I’ll explain what’s missing from most pedagogies on literature reviews.
Why are literature reviews so complex?
Literature reviews demand a range of academic literacies from writers. These include analysis, synthesis and evaluation of critically selected texts, constructing a coherent, consistent and valid argument by interweaving source texts with the writer’s own ideas, and contributing to their discourse community (audience) with some measure of originality. What we want students to achieve is the shift from knowledge-telling to knowledge-transformation in their literature reviews. Knowledge-telling might involve using an approach that includes copying directly from source texts, including too many citations, and representing texts with numerous and lengthy direct quotations. Often this approach is used as a way for novice writers to become familiar with the genre. Knowledge-transformation, however, requires the student to do something with the source documents. Here, the writer takes source texts and uses them in innovative ways to link ideas, concepts, arguments and perspectives and to promote his/her own argument. However, as Cumming, et al. (2016) show, the transition from knowledge-telling to knowledge-transformation is far from automatic; without explicit pedagogy, some students do not make the move.
What basics do students need to know about literature reviews?
First, students need to understand the basic genre. Genres are accepted conventions of both content and form. Explicitly teaching what goes into a literature review can help students to assess their own writing and make active decisions on how much they want to conform to the genre or how much they want to deviate. Table 1 provides an example of how the genre of literature reviews can be explicitly explained to students.
| Literature review | Genre component |
| Introduction | Aim of review |
| Establishes why this subject is interesting/relevant | |
| Scale or scope of review | |
| Describes what is included/excluded | |
| Contains definitions | |
| Explains the organization of the review | |
| Contains meta discourse (signposting for the reader) | |
| Body | Describes methodological frameworks of research read |
| Contains conceptual evolution—describes concepts over time | |
| Contains themes—discusses themes in the debates | |
| Links themes together at some point | |
| Conclusion | Contains a conclusion that relates back to purpose, aim and objectives |
| Key points of review and themes are summarized | |
| Evaluation of current state of literature | |
| Key gaps are identified | |
| Outlines area for future research |
Table 1 Literature review genre components (Jesson, et al., 2011)
Second, students also need to know that there are many ways to use citations. Most often students are taught the conventions of referencing. For example, they are taught how to write a reference in APA style; or they are taught how to cite to avoid plagiarism. However, experienced literature review writers also use citations as a way of performing an academic identity within a discipline. This complexity in citing is often invisible to novice writers because they have fewer opportunities to explicitly ‘see’ these citation patterns. Academics use citations to persuade, to present an argument and to convince readers to accept their work. Through referencing, the writer aligns with particular perspectives, draws on specific authorities and thereby develops credibility. Referencing and citation practices, then, help establish an epistemological framework which is embedded in the context of the discipline or the readers. Academics use citations to connect, through their texts, to the available academic cultures (Hyland 2008). For example, using an author to lead a sentence (as in “Jones (2017) argues…”) foregrounds the authority of an author and indicates to the reader that this author is significant in some way. Grouping citations (as in “(Ballen, 2015; Dix, 2014; Jones, 2017)”) shows breadth of reading and synthesis, while suggesting that none of this literature is significant enough to the writer’s study to earn an author-prominent sentence. Grouping citations positions the writer as knowledgeable and shows evidence of synthesizing the literature. Feak and Swales (2009) cover the many different ways to use sources and to cite.
In this blog post, we’ve looked at the basic knowledge students need to have to write literature reviews. They also need time to practice and to receive ongoing feedback. In the next post, we’ll look at how to teach students the layers of complexity that go into writing a literature review.
DoctoralWriting SIG 
Reblogged this on Cecile Badenhorst.
I’m delighted to see that others are concerned about this matter, and equally, I’m glad that the CARS strategy of Feak and Swales has been mentioned. I’m firmly of the view, however, that we review literature as a constant: it’s the sum of our processing of the materials we peruse. We make notes and lists, we reject and we sometimes pore over items at length whilst purring with bizarre pleasure. The literature review is our professional database. It’s often EndNoted, or sometimes it becomes assigned to Zotera, or Mendeley, or some other such bibliographic software. And increasingly, items of literature and Internet resources are captured in part, or as a whole, in Evernote or One Note. Whatever we gather becomes our repository of sources with which we work.
That work involves us CRITIQUING REVIEWED LITERATURE. I’m asserting here that doctoral candidates and academics assemble and review their literature continuously and that it is the filtered crystallisations of their materials which enable them to formulate arguments which become shaped to constitute their critique.
A friend of mine, Tony Engish, has written about assembling a ‘medley of literature’ – a collection of relevant items which can be used to advance an argument or a proposition. The writer has to make sure that a medley of selected items succeeds in buttressing the central argument. But such items need to feature alongside other sets of accompanying literature. Such supportive materials are used not only to entertain the reader or examiner but also to persuade them about the veracity of the central proposition being argued. That is why I prefer to think of this exercise as being a process of critiquing reviewed literature – a process that follows the ongoing literature review that is commonly referred to by most other writers as ‘the literature review’.
Thank you, Dr. Hansen. I learned much from your comments, as well as your 2000 article on Written Communication. It’s amazing to see important scholars of the field discuss important issues of academic writing on this forum. Thank you!
I think your point “doctoral candidates and academics assemble and review their literature continuously” is so important. We need to, somehow, convey the iterative nature of literature reviews where we re-read, re-think, discard, add and adjust our thinking in the literature review. In this process, we build our thinking conceptually.
Thank you so much, Dr. Badenhorst! I learned so much from your discussion of the literature review. I’m a doctoral student and an EAL writer. I’ve never learned from any course how to conduct a literature review; it seems as students we are expected to “discover” the many tacit rules by ourselves. In my case, while reading literature is not a problem, writing a literature review is such a daunting task that I keep procrastinating.
Thank you for the clear and helpful discussion of the genre expectations. Thank you also for mentioning the useful writings, for example, Hyland (2008) and Harris (2006).
I deeply appreciate professors and experts who blog about issues and solutions of academic writing, as they assume a less (perhaps inappropriate) academic identity and more of a mentor voice. Thank you.
You are so right, Amanda – reading the literature and writing the review are two completely different things. We often lump them together as if they are the same activity.