|
A Guide to Writing Literature Reviews in Political Science and Public Administration
Department
of Political Science
UNC
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
What A Literature Review Is A literature review
summarizes and critically analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of research
on a topic or research question. To write a literature review, you first
collect and read the research that has been written on the topic. You then
summarize this research’s specific questions, hypotheses, method of analysis,
and conclusions. The best literature reviews then analyze the existing
research by drawing conclusions about what parts of it are most valuable and
important, and about how future research could be conducted to have the most
substantial influence on the field. Literature reviews can
stand on their own or serve as part of a larger
paper. “Stand alone” literature reviews are useful for bring the reader up to
speed on the state of the art of research. Most research projects, such as
research papers or theses that you may be assigned, also contain a literature
review. Here the purpose is to demonstrate to the reader the specific areas
in which your project contributes to or builds upon existing research.
What a Literature Review Is Not Many find the word
“literature” confusing in this context because they associate literature with
great works of fiction or poetry. A literature review summarizes the state of
knowledge on a topic or research question. So the relevant “literature”
consists of publications that contribute to existing knowledge on the topic
or question. The literature review is
also not the place to present your main argument, your hypotheses, your data,
your findings, or your conclusions. Keep it focused on summarizing and
evaluating existing research on your topic. For a literature review in
political science or public administration, you are most likely to find the
relevant literature in books, articles in scholarly or policy journals, or
research papers. You are unlikely to find cutting edge research in other
sorts of publications, so in general avoid newspaper and magazine articles,
commentary, many government publications (unless they are works of legitimate
research sponsored or carried out by a government agency), and most web pages.
Of course you should ensure that the specific assignment you are preparing is
consistent with the advice offered here; when the two conflict, consult your
instructor.
Finding Relevant Literature So where do you find the
literature? It is tempting to begin by typing a few key words into an
internet search engine. This is likely to be a poor use of your time. It will
generate links to many web pages, but few will be research literature of the
type discussed above.
The Snowball Method The most efficient approach
is the “snowball” method. Here you first identify one or more publications
for your literature review. Textbooks for your current or previous classes
are often a good way to find at least a few sources for your literature
review. Textbooks usually cite the most influential and important works on a
topic. So find the section of the text that discusses the topic or question
that is the subject of your literature review. Read the footnotes carefully
and obtain copies of the sources cited there. Once you have a handful of
sources, repeat the process. Most of these sources should have a brief
literature review. You can mine the sources cited in the footnotes in these
literature reviews for additional important sources. Finding the literature
review section of a book or article can be surprisingly difficult. Few
authors include a section entitled “Literature Review.” Some are reluctant to
directly criticize (and thus cite) earlier work in great detail. Others avoid
including lengthy literature reviews so that they will have more space to
make a new contribution to the stream of research. One method for finding the
literature review section is to look for a section or paragraph that
highlights the novel contribution that the book or article makes to existing
knowledge. Typically at about this point the author will cite other work in
the field that you will want to read for your review. In an article, this is
likely to occur in the introduction or the first full section; in a book, the
literature review likely will be in the preface, the introduction, or the
first chapter. Note that at this point it is not necessary to read the entire
book or article. Right now you are just mining the source for additional
sources.
Library Book Catalogues Books will be a very
important source for your literature review in most fields in political
science and public administration. Here I want to give you a few tips on how
to search online library catalogues to find relevant books. Note that for a
scholarly literature review you are best served by working in a university
library; local or municipal libraries are unlikely to hold many of the
research books that you want. Most library catalogues
allow you to search for books by author, keyword, title, and so on. These
search fields are straightforward and operate in a manner similar to a search
engine. Perhaps the most valuable but least used search field is “subject”.
All books are assigned one or more subjects that they cover. The useful thing
for a literature review about the subject is that once you find one book on a
topic, you can easily search for all the other books on the same subject.
Here is an example using
UNC Charlotte’s Atkin’s Library Catalog. Let’s
imagine that the topic of your is the relationship is the creation of the
European Union’s single currency (out of a combination of hubris and
convenience, I am going to cite my own work in this and the following
examples). Through the snowball method, you have identified my book (James I.
Walsh, European Monetary Integration
and Domestic Politics, 2000) as likely to be relevant to your review. You
look this book up in the library’s catalog (available here), which produces the
following:
Notice towards the bottom
the “Subject” heading. These are all of the subject classifications for which
this book qualifies. The last heading—“Economic and Monetary Union”—seems
most relevant to your work. If you click on this it brings up a link for the
topic as well as the number of entries (i.e. other books) that fall under
this heading. Clicking on this link will bring up a list of all the titles
that the library holds on this subject heading. You can now look through
this list to identify additional books that will be of interest to you for
the literature review. Note that many of these books will have similar call
numbers and be shelved together in the same section of the library. So you
may want to actually visit the library (FYI—it is the tall brick building),
find the shelves containing these works, and quickly skim through them to
determine which books you need and which books you do not. You may also want to search
the catalogs of other university libraries that have larger collections of
books. Libraries with particularly comprehensive collections include the Library of Congress, Harvard University (click on the link for
HOLLIS catalog), and Yale University.
If you find a book that our library does not own, you can request to borrow
it through our library’s Inter-Library Loan
service. Note that Inter-Library Loan books often take a week or more to
arrive, so make sure you search other library’s catalogues well before your
paper is due.
Library Article Databases Articles in scholarly
journals are another important source of literature for your review. Atkins
library subscribes to databases that allow you to search for articles and, in
most cases, to download the full text of articles that you find. The library frequently
changes the databases to which it subscribes, so it is more difficult to give
precise instructions about how to search for articles than for books. Here I
will focus on a few general tips. You should consult a research librarian
with more specific questions. Click here to see
how to contact a librarian. Note that to access these
databases, you must either be using a computer that is located on campus, or
have logged into remotely to the library’s server. You can log in with your
Novell username and password here. The library organizes its
databases by subject category here. The categories most likely to be relevant
to your search include Africana Studies, Government and Legal, Political
Science, Public Administration, and Public Policy. Clicking on these links
will bring you to a web page that lists all of the relevant article databases
to which the library subscribes. Many of these databases mix
the scholarly journals that you want to search with other publications such
as newspapers and magazines. How can you tell what is a scholarly journal and
what is not? Some databases allow you to restrict your search to “scholarly”
or “peer reviewed” journals; if so, select this option. You may also want to
ask your instructor for a list of the most important journals that cover your
topic, or if a specific publication would be appropriate for your literature
review.
Google Scholar Google Scholar is a new and
valuable tool for finding relevant works. It includes books, scholarly
articles, unpublished research papers, and other sources. You might be able
to find sources here that do not appear in our library’s catalog and article
databases. The best place to start is
with Google Scholar’s Advanced
Search. This allows you to search for keywords and phrases, to eliminate
results that contain particular words, and to limit your search to certain
dates.
Organizing Your Review Once you have located the
relevant scholarly literature, how should you review it? In general, it is a
bad idea to review the literature work by work or in chronological order.
Most such reviews are far too lengthy. They are also pretty boring. A better way to organize
the literature is by what I will call schools of thought. Here you group the
existing literature by some criteria and discuss each of these schools of
thought. For example, the literature might fall into distinct theoretical
traditions. Or the methods used might vary in important ways across
publications. Or the literature might be addressing different research
questions, or providing different answers to the same research question.
Organizing your literature
review by schools of thought has a number of advantages over other
approaches. It means that you may not need to discuss each work cited in any
detail. Instead, you can summarize the elements that these works share in
common. It is much more interesting to read a review organized in this way
than one organized by each work or chronologically. A schools of thought
literature review is also much easier to write. The reason is that you can,
at least initially, treat each school of thought as its own mini-literature
review by analyzing its questions, methods, and conclusions. You are less
likely to be overwhelmed by the need to summarize many disparate research
publications if you organize your work in this way. Organizing by schools of
thought also makes it a bit easier to decide how future research can be
conducted in a way that best contributes to our collective knowledge of a
topic or research question. All literature reviews MUST
properly cite the research that it discusses and analyzes. This is
particularly important in literature reviews because your reader many be
interested not only in what you write about the existing work on a topic, but
also may want to use your list of references to begin investigating the topic
in greater detail. For details on how to cite sources, as well as other
information on organizing your work, consult the Department of Political
Science’s Student
Handbook for Writing Papers.
An Example To make things more
concrete, let me give an example from a recent paper of mine that you can
read here.
The literature review for the paper starts on page 492 and ends on page 495.
Here is the first paragraph:
When
does the failure of a policy lead decision makers to alter or replace
it? How does policy failure influence
the form and content of subsequent policy? Three streams of research address
these questions.
So this paragraph
reminds the reader of the research question that motives the entire article,
that I am about to review what existing research has to say about this
question, and that I have organized this research into three schools of thought.
The article terms
these schools of thought the accountability, ideas, and garbage can
approaches. For each school, I first identify how works within this school
answer the research question, and then identify what I see as gaps or
weaknesses with this school. The purpose is the set the stage for the
subsequent section’s discussion of how these weaknesses and gaps can be
resolved more satisfactorily. Note that the discussion of each school of
thought is in effect a miniature literature review of those works, and that the citations combine many works rather
than address them sequentially or chronologically. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||