🗃️ 10. Organizing the Literature

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 10: Organizing the Literature, which should be completed as an exercise in catching up and drafting as needed during spring break between 3/29 - 4/5. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 9, go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. If you didn’t complete the Literature Review Tutorial, please be aware that I can’t accept late submissions as it was a time-bound activity; however, you should complete it for yourself anyway, as it contains important information about Unit 2 of the Qualitative Research Project (QRP). Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Review the structure of the literature review
• Finalize and organize your sources in your literature review
• Review the role of synthesis, relevance, and exigence in organizing your literature review

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

Refreshers: Unit 2 and Literature Review

By now, you should have a general sense of what writing a literature review entails: it’s a process of evaluating, (re)considering, selecting, analyzing (breaking down and examining its components), and synthesizing (putting them together in a way that leads to new connections and insights).

🛑 Stop: Read!

Reread the full guidelines for the Qualitative Research Project, then reread the Unit 2 guidelines. Remember, each unit should respond specifically to the unit guidelines and generally to the full assignment guidelines.

Literature Review Refresher

Still shaky on what a literature review is and how to do it? Recently figured out that you need to redo your preliminary research because your research hypotheses aren’t narrow enough yet? Here are two more resources to help you:

🛑 Stop: Read!

This self-guided tutorial by Indiana University LibGuides defines a literature review — including its WID dimensions — and demonstrates how to search, critically read, analyze, and synthesize the literature.

As you begin drafting the literature review, you’ll find that you end up with a few key authors who are studying the specific research area you’re investigating — these sources will form what Pacheco-Vega calls “the backbone of the literature review.” You may also have sources actively investigating a problem, gap, or tension pertaining to one aspect of your research questions — these sources will form your contextual sources.

Contextual sources should not be confused for “background sources,” a term students often use to refer to objective statements, statistics, and other facts. You might have learned in high school or other classes that background sources are important for fact-based reports or position papers, where you’re either regurgitating facts or defending a preestablished position on a polarizing topic. Neither of these approaches belong in advanced qualitative research.

🛑 Stop: Read!

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog post on “How to Undertake a Literature Review” further describes qualitative research in the context of doing a literature review.

In Pacheco-Vega’s “walkthrough” of doing a literature review, note the following and do the same in your own Qualitative Research Projects (QRPs):

• He immediately divides his research area into two thematic categories based on the work of the anchor authors he’s going to use
• He uses citation tracing — checking all the sources you’ve selected to see how many of your chosen authors are citing each other — to figure out whether or not he’s reached conceptual saturation
• He limits himself to 1-2 ideas floating around in the literature and reads the authors working on one or both of those ideas until conceptual saturation is achieved
• He uses a mindmap sketch to visualize relationships between articles and concepts, but using the Lit Review Matrix handout or CSD Excel spreadsheet would be just as effective.

Practice!

Now that you’ll be using what you learned so far to help you draft, a more precise definition of conceptual saturation is when you see the same citations repeated across the research you’re doing — a pretty strong sign that your area of research and approach has gotten narrow and specific enough. As you reevaluate your sources based on the annotated bibliography feedback given in #team, using Pacheco-Vega’s guide to citation tracing,

Writing the ENG 201 Lit Review

Once you’ve filled out the Lit Review Matrix handout or CSD Excel spreadsheet, you’ll need to read through your sources and only keep the 6 that are relevant and useful for your narrow area of focus.

You might have a few that seem like they could work, based on a title or a few words here or there, but when you read them, you may realize they don’t work — and that’s okay! It’s preferable to exclude these sources. You definitely shouldn’t use every source you read!

The most important thing to remember is that a literature review is not just a bunch of summaries about articles related to your topic. This is probably the number one problem with most early-draft literature reviews: the student spends all their time summarizing and doing nothing else.

Your reader doesn’t want to just find out what those articles were about; they’re trying to learn:

1. How does the article address some part of your research hypotheses, i.e. why even mention this article in your paper? (Usually the first sentence of the paragraph)
2. What distinct argument is each article making? (How you introduce the article afterwards, often a few sentences)
3. What are the findings in each article? (The end of the paragraph, often 2-4 sentences)

As for the sources related to your research area, you should group them thematically based on their content, the way that Pacheco-Vega describes in his “How to Undertake a Literature Review” blog post linked above.

As you read these articles, you should have been taking extensive notes in your Conceptual Synthesis Dump Excel spreadsheet and/or Literature Review Matrix sheet. Referring to these notes and your annotations in the articles themselves will help you identify and specifically name commonalities between articles. The names of these commonalities will be the subheadings for each of the two subsections in your Literature Review.

Signal Phrases and Model Papers

As always, higher-order concerns are much more important than lower-order concerns like grammar and mechanics, but it can be easy to get stuck if you don’t have the right transition sentence between ideas within or between paragraphs. Here are some resources to help you with that!

🛑 Stop: Read!

Signal phrases and words can be used to express the relationship between existing scholarship and your own research, as suggested by this chart from USC’s The C.A.R.S. Model. The Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing chapter in the Writers’ Handbook

In addition to the model papers posted to Classes and the model annotated paper posted to the General Feedback, you can find sample student work demonstrating how to write a literature review for the ENG 201 Qualitative Research Project in this Literature Review/Interviews - Google Drive (OER).

Exit Writing

🥳 Congratulations on getting through this chapter! Don’t forget to check the Calendar for the week’s assignments, including your process reflection and #team posts as well as any other assigned writing. Make sure to look ahead to future weeks as well to get a sense of when low- and high-stakes writing for the rest of Unit 2 is due.

Reference List for This Week’s Resources