Hey wonderful humans and welcome back to my channel, my name is Lucy and I'm a PhD student
at the University of Birmingham and today I want to talk to you all about
literature reviews. Now you may be sitting there thinking, but you're
an English Literature student, you don't do literature reviews? Isn't that a science thing?
It is more well known for scientists to do literature reviews, in the very sort of formatted
codified way that ends up in your final thesis, however I would argue that English, for PhD
students, humanities PhD students, we are doing literature reviews throughout our process. We just
don't write them up in the same way and we don't necessarily do them in such a condensed fashion
because we're doing them all the time. We're using the same skill set; we're just ending up with a
different end product. In my first supervision one of the things my supervisor said was ‘go find out
everything you can about queer theory, try to read up on queer theory, figure out what's important,
who are the main critics’. That's a literature review. I just didn't do it officially. I didn't
do it formally. I did it informally, for myself to benefit my future research. The other reason I’m
doing this video is loads of you have asked for it and on this channel I like to give my viewers what
they want. So this is my very succinct way not of saying welcome to the literature review video.
So the first question is, what is a literature review? A literature review, quite simply, is just
a survey of scholarship in an area or topic that you are researching and it's where you evaluate
and analyse the value of this research, how it connects with and interconnects with each other.
How it connects to your research and what gaps your research is filling. I would argue there are
five main steps for a literature review, but three of them are important for humanity students. Step
number one is: find relevant literature. Now as a humanity student you're probably quite
familiar with using the library, using sources finding books, articles, essays on the topic that
you are currently writing on and you use a lot of those same skills when you're looking for a
literature review. I would say the first place you can start looking is the library. Search
key terms. What are the books that come up? Are there some reoccurring authors? I would also say
search the shelves. This is something I picked up at the University of Edinburgh when I did my
master's there. Find out what your code is in the library and then just go search yourselves,
have a physical look down, what is relevant ‘oh that book's interesting.
Oh this I didn't think to look at this term but actually that sounds really interesting’.
You will be amazed what you can find and what could be useful from just physically searching
the shelves and seeing what books are around kind of the key text that you have focused
in on. If you broaden your perspective a bit you might find texts that surprise you. Now the thing
is you can take this one step further you don't just have to look within your library catalogue
there's so many other online, particularly articles, you can look for. You can look at
JStor, Google Scholar, Project Muse, there's so many of these that you can look for. The thing
I would say to be aware of is often because these are free they tend to be older articles,
so you might not get as much of the cutting edge articles but they will still be relevant and just
because they're older doesn't mean they've not had a significant contribution to your field and
they've not had a big influence. In fact sometimes they need to be older to have had that influence.
I would say the next step is if you know any journals that are particularly useful to your
topic. So for me the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, I combed through their backlog and looked
for anything that discussed queer romance novels or anything that discussed sexuality
or anything that's discussed gender within romance novels whether it's a queer romance novel or a
straight romance novel. I'd say another great way to find resources is to look at bibliographies of
key texts, particularly more recently written ones. If you've got an article that's say was
written in 2019 look through that bibliography. Who are they quoting? Who are they talking about?
Then look through an article maybe from 2010, are there any crossovers? What are the articles or
critics that keep getting reference throughout the years? Because then they're probably someone that
you should look at or a book you should look at because clearly it's had quite a lot of influence
on your scholarship today. So that's how you can find scholars and works that could be important
to you, but now you've found all this scholarship what do you do with it? You need to evaluate it.
So number two: evaluate your research or evaluate your sources. I think academic reviews and book
reviews are something that you're not really aware of as undergrad, you maybe become aware of for a
masters, but they're crucially important when you're doing a PhD. If you are able to try and
find reviews of any text you come across, often if you search them they will pop up in the library
search bar a few results down, and this is because if you can read three or four reviews and find out
that all those books aren't useful rather than reading three or four books and then find out
they're not that useful you have saved yourself so much time. And time is something that you are
not going to get back so anything we can do to save ourselves time we should do. As I mentioned
before you can read the abstract you can read the reviews and you you'll be able to immediately
dismiss some research that you thought was super relevant but actually when you delve into it
it's not relevant at all so you just immediately say ‘I'm not going to read them’. Then you get
the other ones where you're like ‘oh I think this could be useful, but I'm not quite sure’.
So what you do with that is give it an initial skim read and by skim read I really do mean,
you know take two minutes, maybe, to just skim through this article.
Look at keywords and just kind of think are they talking about topics that are interesting to me?
Are the overall scopes of this useful? Another way you can do this and assess this really quickly is
what are the headings they're using? What other sort of ways have they broken their article down
into? Not all articles do this, but some do and therefore look at the headings and just assess
whether they are useful to you or not, whether they are relevant. Once you've done a quick skim
read through you will probably be able to tell whether this article is worthy of a more in-depth
look. So once you've established that this article is useful for you there are a few questions you
then need to ask as you're reading through it. One of the main things we want to be doing when
we're reading these articles, these books or these chapters in detail is we want to ask ourselves:
what are the key theories that are being discussed here? What are the key concepts that this article
or piece of scholarship is engaging with? What are they missing out? What are they not talking about?
How does this relate to my own research? How does it relate to other research? Are they engaging
with other critics that I should either be aware of or are they not engaging with a key critic?
And then you might be like ‘that's a bit suss, maybe this article isn't as valuable as I thought
it was?’. So when you're reading these take a note of quotes, but also I would say if you've
watched my video on how to organize your notes and research, create a little section just for you.
A few bullet points that basically answer those questions, how useful is it? How does it relate
to your research? Who have they engaged with and any further reading that you might have got from
this and by doing that you're starting to evaluate the sources, not just for their ideas but for how
they are useful to you, how they relate to you and how they relate to other research in your field.
At the moment you're just trying to establish who the big players are in your field and how you
could later engage with them and get information out of them and challenge them potentially.
This is what I would consider the third and final step for a humanities
literature review is you want to then start identifying themes and debates and gaps
across the scholarship you have seen. So let's say you've now read 15 pieces of scholarship
you now want to do a process, I would do this via mind maps, of finding what are the key connectors?
What are the kind of things they keep coming back to? The topics they keep talking about?
Are there any outliers? Are there any people who, yes they're useful but they haven't discussed this
or ‘oh only two or three people have discussed this’ but I think it's worthy of more research.
This is where you want to start pulling people together in a more closely defined way
and really seeing what the themes are that emerge and kind of the common debates and arguments that
are happening within your field because these are the debates and arguments that you're going
to tap into potentially with your thesis. Now one way I did this, so my master's dissertation, is I
put all my scholarship in chronological order and by doing this I was really able to track how the
debates had changed over time, how the different themes had become important, what were the current
debates, what are debates that have been popular maybe 20 years ago but now fizzled out and I found
doing that was a really useful way to kind of get my head around the literature in a very tangible
way. So I’d recommend doing that, then doing one that is more focused on themes. So let's
say you're looking at queer theory, but you're really interested in femininity and how femininity
has been queered or approached by queer theorists. So gather all the articles that look at feminism,
femininity, that look at women, that look at the body or female body in particular and just have
them, again you could do it in chronological order or you could do it by theme, but that way you then
know you've got this bulk of research that is on a particular topic that could be of interest of you.
You can also then very easily see how people within that theme are relating to each other.
How are they talking to each other? Are they talking to each other? Are they not talking to
each other? And by doing that you get a really firm grasp of what is happening in your research
and that's really important. What you want to do potentially, for your own peace of mind, is then
notice any gaps. Now that you've got this really good sense of what is the literature out there on
my topic you are going to notice there are some gaps and this is crucially important
because these are the gaps that your thesis could then potentially start to fill in, or at least
highlight and say more work needs to be done on this. This is just a starting point because
let's be realistic it's a PhD thesis you're not gonna have all the answers straight away.
So this is where I would say the literature review for a humanity student ends, because then once we
have all that knowledge maybe we write up a paragraph for ourselves or paragraph to show
our supervisors. We then go on to the next step, which is deep diving into a topic or
deep diving into an author or a period of history and we use all this background knowledge we have
gathered to say okay I’m really interested in queer relationships and I know that there's all
these critics that talk about them and now I need to go and deep dive into it
and really get my head around how my close reading is going to relate to these topics.
So therefore that's where it ends for us. We don't ever write it up officially, we don't ever put it
in our thesis in such a condensed way but it's still a very useful early step to do. Especially
if your PhD is talking about a topic that you are maybe not as familiar with, or one that you
haven't studied as much but are super interested in and I would actually say this is something you
do a lot. Particularly in your first six months, however, you're going to do it throughout and
you're going to kind of keep repeating this process when you discover new topics that
you're interested in because that's the backbone of research for us as English Literature students,
especially if you are doing one that isn't manuscript-led or doesn't have any other kind of
close primary sources attached to it like mine doesn't really. I have my data but I’m not having
to go into the archives and find long forgotten texts because all my research is 21st century.
So that is the video, as you can see literature reviews for humanity students are a little
bit different, but we definitely still do them and they are definitely still a valuable skill
that you should be hopefully fine-tuning as a PhD student because this is going to form the backbone
of your research for quite a few years. As always if you have any questions feel free to leave a
comment because I love debating and talking to you guys in my comments or if you want to
follow me on Instagram and send me a DM that is always welcome and I respond to everybody
who is polite. So yeah I will see you next Sunday.
Byyeee!