Reviewing the research literature

Reviewing the research literature

Immersing yourself in the research and scholarly literature is an essential aspect of interrogating the topic you have chosen and bringing focus to it through your research question(s), although the literature review is something that you will con- tinue to do well into the period of fieldwork itself (Walliman, 2013). It is therefore

important that you critically review everything of relevance to your chosen topic area. This is, in part, to demonstrate that you are aware of and understand that which is already published, and that you are able to interpret it in relation to your study. As Alison Wakefield details in Chapter 3, the process of doing a literature review enables you to identify relevant questions to ask, themes to include, meth- odologies to follow, as well as allowing for the development of conceptual or theoretical frameworks and the framing of empirical research findings.

Literature reviews can take several forms. These can include a systematic review, a rapid evidence assessment and a narrative review (Bryman, 2008; Hart, 1998), and the choice of literature review that criminologists adopt as part of the research process is determined by their research questions and overall ambitions for the project. As Box 2. 1 notes, sometimes the literature review will form the substantive basis upon which the research will be based, while in projects that propose to deliver primary research, the literature review will be used to support the development of the research strategy, will act as your springboard into the field and will be drawn on when making sense of the data collected. In systematic literature reviews, the approach to searching and assessing the literature is in its own right sophisticated, and the methodology is written up and presented as a separate section.

At an early stage of planning your dissertation, your approach to reviewing the literature will most likely resemble that of a narrative review. Narrative reviews are used much more to develop understanding of a topic area and can involve more of a developmental and uncertain process. While they may have a starting point, they do not always have an identifiable end point, and your searching and reading might take you to places that you had not anticipated at the outset. Narrative reviews offer less specific criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of studies, and are by their very nature much more wide-ranging and fluid pieces of work.

Most of you will start by reading textbook overviews and summary articles on your particular chosen topic area, scanning their bibliographies for relevant further sources. In doing so, however, remember that summary and textbook overviews will have been written with a particular emphasis in mind, and that a textbook author’s take on a particular research study may differ from that of someone else’s (including your own, and that of the author of the study), so it is important to read the original research study if you can. Nevertheless, what textbook and summary articles do allow is for you to get started quickly, devel- oping your understanding of the key issues that arise from a review of your topic area. After all, the objective here is to discover relevant material published on the topic area in order to help support the framing of the research question(s). After a while, you will start to build up a succinct overview of the proposed subject area, detailing what the literature has to say about the topic area, iden- tifying gaps in the literature, areas of informed debate and specific research studies and key themes.

Reading and note taking

As part of your degree programme, you will already have developed skills in critical read- ing. It is a process which is much slower than reading for pleasure and involves absorption and reflection of the material being read within a questioning/critical framework to ensure that you understand what you are reading and how it relates to your topic, and that you are able to draw out the key points of relevance. A critical analysis of any text (book, article etc) should begin with an acknowledgement that different perspectives exist on any given topic. Acknowledging this will ensure that you make yourself aware of the perspective from which specific authors you are reading are working from. In this way, you will be then able to explore the evidence presented and how, assess the author- ity of the author(s) to make the claims being made, and identify any biases or other issues in the argument as presented. You should then be able to identify the strengths and limi- tations of the research discussed, and assess its implications and significance for your own study. Furthermore, you should examine the connections between each particular piece of work you have read and the work of others on the same topic.

It is essential that you make good notes as part of the literature review. Remember, you will come back to these at some point in the future. Your notes must be succinct and detail the page numbers of any quotes listed. Don’t just copy but summarize and critically evaluate the text that you read. In addition, always note the full biblio- graphical details of all the sources you use in your dissertation. You may wish to teach yourself how to use Endnote bibliographic software. Endnote can help you to manage your references, insert citations into your text and, at the same time, create a reference list in your selected reference style, such as Harvard.