Boote and Beile (2005) highlighted many important points such as
characteristics of good literature review, the purpose of literature review,
organizing literature and writing a synthesis of researches in the literature.
Those are important things which doctoral students should develop as researcher
skills.
Boote and Beile’s rubric shows how they perceived the literature review.
After I started my doctoral study, I realized that different researchers have
different perception of literature review. For instance, my instructors always
criticized my writings due to including my viewpoints that has been drawn the
synthesis of the research in the literature. I still remember one of the professor’s
statement (during my master’s degree): “Always
remember that you are currently nothing/no one in this literature. You are not
a professor, you are not the specialist of this research area. So, you cannot
include your viewpoints”. After 4-5 years, they eventually fixed my writing
J Now, I put reference
after each idea. And now, my professors at IU think that I put a lot of
unnecessary citations and suggest me to organize my literature review
coherently and support the ideas which will contribute to my study, highlight
the points that I will touch with my study and show the gaps in the literature.
Now, I am trying to adapt this perception of literature review. The difference
between those two perception is, in fact, the dichotomy of summarize vs.
synthesize.
Another important point that Boote and Beile (2005) highlighted is how
to teach writing literature review. Again, I want to reflect on my previous
experience and shared how I learned to write literature review. I learned
through observations. I always observed my instructors and colleagues in Turkey
to understand how they are writing their literature reviews. I saw that they
were taking a paper in front of them and writing a summary, and them they were
using those summaries to write their literature review. Thus, literature
reviews were mostly based on summaries.
It was very difficult to change the skill that has already been
developed. Yet, I do not think that I completely developed this skill. Of
course, writing in second language makes it more difficult.
Currently, I am trying to build my own perception of literature review.
While reading any paper or dissertation, I keep two purpose in my mind: (1)
learning about the study itself, and (2) learning how to organize and write
literature review. Having this lens in reading really helped me to understand
the purpose of literature review. I usually build my descriptions attaching
with an image or metaphor. For literature review, my current metaphor is a
curved pathway downs from the top of the mountain and reaches where I am
standing (in fact I am standing in front of the mountain and looking at it).
Every curve gets the pathway closer to me, that is, I should organize the
literature review and so the ideas mentioned in the previous research should be
connected with each other and they also should connect/inform/support/disagree
with/etc. the research interest and/or researcher position. This is a
continuous path, not the composition of short isolated pathways. This is my
current metaphor and is changing constantly.
I think, “How to teach writing a good literature review to novice
researchers” is an important issue.
Moreover, Paulus, Lester, and Dempster (2013) mentioned about other
important aspects of literature review: deciding on the digital tools,
evaluating the source quality and using citation management systems in
annotations. Since I am currently working on my dissertation proposal, literature
review is one of the difficult job that I should complete. Therefore, I am looking
for citation management software and decide on the one that will meet my
expectations. In this respect, this chapter and the course readings of this
week really helped me.
