How to work with literature and write a literary review for analytical articles?

In contrast to the pre-internet (or pre-google scholar) era, where the main challenge of an article was to find an adequate amount of literature, the main challenge today is not to get lost in the apparent endless amount of literature on each given topic.

This is not only time-consuming, it also makes it a stressful process since, for the sake of synthesis (a bibliography should account for no more than 10-20% of the article in terms of words) you will need to leave out a large number of articles that seem nonetheless relevant to you.

I’ve seen papers attempting to cite as many works as possible. But this efforts often ends up into a mishmash of various works that lacks a “red line” linking all the cited works around a consistent narrative.

Eventually, the most effective narrative I’ve found so far consists of organising the literature section  into “theory A vs theory B” where theory A is the most popular theory in your field and theory B is the most important critique to theory A so far.

Where to insert the literature review

The literature review must go both in the introduction and in the duly literature section. The introduction will only list the basic theories you want to deal with. The literature section will expand the discourse to include most of the important works.

Whatever the focus of your paper, empirical or theoretical, stating what are the main works you intend to engage with at the beginning of the article will enable the reader (or the reviewer) to “locate” your paper in current debates. This means not only to appreciate more easily the contribution of your paper. Stating clearly where your paper stands means that the reviewer or the reader will be guided through it and will be able to make appropriate suggestions (or simply understand the uses of your paper more easily).

I usually start a paper stating that “theory A has shown so far that…but theory B has contrasted this vision by showing that” and then go on to explain that my paper: 1) confirms A; 2) supports B; 3) looks for a synthesis between A and B; 4) criticizes both A and B.

Theory A is the work of a scholar, or group of scholars, that is well known as the most important statement in the field at that time. Theory B is the most important critique to that theory.

This statement is then integrated in the literature part where I not only explain more in detail my position but locate it within the most important studies conducted so far. These can be regional studies, theoretical or empirical ones. But what are the most important and relevant studies for my paper?

Step 1: search

My paper is exploring a correlation between variables – if A changes in this way, then B changes this way. I will then choose some keywords that are related to A and B and look for previous works in the topic. For instance, for a study on national identity through tourism brochures in Estonia, I made a search around: “tourism” and “nation branding” alone and then together “tourism, nation branding” and finally in Estonia, Eastern Europe and the Baltics. This integrated the search I had made for other articles about identity, identity construction, everyday nationalism and everyday identity.

I used google scholar but you could use any other database, as long as it gives you access to a wide variety of studies.

Step 2: select and rank

Not all studies that you will find will be relevant to the same extent. I thus select those that deserve be read entirely, those I can skim through and those I just need to read the abstract to know that they exist.

In the process, I will probably find out that some papers that I deemed very important, are not. And, by contract, some that I thought were marginal are actually very relevant to my paper.

In this process I start from the number of citations each paper has received as one of the criteria (NB not the only one) to decide whether I will prioritise (and thus cite) or not a given work. The logic behind is that it is more likely that a reviewer will notice the absence, in my bibliography, of a paper that was cited 1000 times than of one that was cited 10 times.

But citation is not the only criteria. If I am producing a study on a small country, it is likely that all other studies on that country will have received fewer citations than more important seminal works. I then try to take onboard the highest amount of studies already produced on that country or region regardless of the number of citations.

Finally, as someone who has studied a given region for a number of years, I have a pool of favourite articles and books that I usually use to structure my discourse and this is based in my personal preferences, intuition, theoretical standpoint.

Subjectivity is important. It should not be confused with the arrogant idea that “I am the expert so if I do not know a study it means it’s not really relevant”. Works are produced every day and you should keep track of them (this is why acting as a reviewer for several journals is useful to learn about other papers, authors and debates). You should also acknowledge works by other scholars and keep on expanding your knowledge. But you will act as a filter of all the works you read that end up processed in your head to produce a subjective, but hopefully accurate, description of a phenomenon.

Step 3: order and structure

A literature review should have a pyramidal structure with the top of the pyramid being general social theory, the middle being empirically grounded studies that engage with theory and the bottom being regional or all empirical studies.

The pyramid could also be reversed (upside down pyramid). This means that you can either start your literature review with a major social theory problem and then move into empirical studies or you can start with empirical studies to then explain their contribution to social theory.

What is important here is that the literature review allows to identify gaps in literature. You could say “The works mentioned have explained this and that but they have failed to engage (or explain) this particular aspect that my paper is going to explore”.

Decide what are the main topics your paper will be engaging with. Then, for each major concept you intend to engage with, explain what has been done so far (main findings of the field) and what is missing and your paper will try to explain. This will be done in the end of the literature section, where you will de facto introduce the empirical section, where you will actually show how you’re filling the gaps you’ve identified in the literature sections.

Accept your limits

The golden rule is “one paper, one idea”. You will not be able to address all the gaps in literature with a single paper. Trying to do so will make the paper only more confusing so stick to one idea and follow it through. If you’ve identified several gaps that need to be addressed urgently, you can mention this in the conclusion.

The conclusion will then summarise the paper but also show new possible avenues of research for the next years. This could include something else you are working on but did not insert in the paper to keep it simple.

Read more: The SCOPUS Diaries and the (il)logics of Academic Survival