 Hello, this short video introduces my short book engaging with previous research in your doctoral thesis beyond the literature review. The scare quotes around literature review in the title of the book are really trying to set up for you the notion that the concept of a literature review chapter is quite problematic in some ways. The word literature suggests that there is a very clearly definable body of literature out there for you to discover a scope and so on, which is often not the case in many PhD and EDD theses. And the word review suggests that you need to take them one by one, these pieces of research and critique them as you might do a book review or a film review. And that's really not what you're doing and I'm going to talk a little bit about what you are doing as the video goes on. So rather than talking about the literature and review, I'd rather talk about engaging with the literature or even mobilizing research for your own previous research, for your own research. In fact some doctoral theses don't have a literature review chapter as such. They mobilize the literature and engage with it as they need it within the discussion, within the analysis section and so on. And in a sense we can make a distinction as they do in manufacturing and distribution between just in case and just in time. So the literature review chapter at its worst, understood in the traditional way, is just in case. I'll put everything into this chapter just in case I need it, whereas the just in time approach might not have a chapter and introduces previous research, engages with it, mobilizes it as necessary. So that's the first thing to think about. One of the things that often causes some issues for doctoral students particularly at the beginning is how to determine the content if there isn't a very clear body of literature out there. I would say that there are four things that you need to think about when you're constructing the content of the literature that you're going to mobilize in your research and in your theses. First thing is the research questions and they should be one of the very early things that you do. Do the research questions suggest any areas of literature that need to be addressed and engaged with? Are there any concepts in there, for example, that need to be engaged with? Are there any areas of previous research? Usually there will be. Second one is the methods used and the methodology in the research design. Now it's not normally necessary to go into great detail about traditional methods of data collection and so on, or even methodologies in the sense of overall research design and the underpinning sets of assumptions behind the research design. Their citations and brief references to show that you are familiar with the literature are enough. You don't want to be writing a textbook. But if there are any unusual, particularly innovative approaches that you're using in terms of your methods or your design, then those need to be addressed through previous literature and approaches. The third element of thinking about the particulars of the literature that you're going to engage with is the theoretical and conceptual resources that you're deploying in your research. Clearly writers who have talked about, for example, critical realism or Bordier's work if you're using that and so on need to be addressed. But again, you don't want to be writing a textbook. You want to be thinking about the nature of your research in particular and how those theoretical resources are going to apply and then engage with that literature appropriately. The fourth and final criterion for thinking about the content of your literature engagement is the knowledge claims that you're going to be making for the value, for the significance of your research. It's often quite hard to do that at the beginning. That's one reason why reviewing the literature isn't a thing that you do at the beginning or in the middle. It's an ongoing process which develops as you're writing the thesis, doing the research and so on. The kinds of claims that you're making are often related to previous accumulation, agglomeration of knowledge in the area that you're looking at and what you want to show is how yours is different or adds to that. Now in the literature there's quite a lot of literature on doing literature reviews. You can very often find lists of ways in which one should not write a literature review of the kinds of mistakes that are often made. So I've developed my own but I'm going to critique these kinds of lists in a moment. First of all, giving other people definitions of important concepts without actually giving your own, which might follow somebody else's or it might be a development of it. Second problem is not relating your own engagement with the literature to the thesis, the particulars of the thesis and not telling the reader what the point of your commentary on previous research is, why it's relevant. Third one is not drawing out your own position from the discussion of other people's perspectives in previous research. Another issue, the fourth one is treating the reader as a novice who needs educating. The writing, the textbook is a very frequent problem in doctoral theses. Remember that your readers are your examiners and they're going to be well versed in the area and don't need to be patronized or educated. Another problem is only describing elements of literature rather than engaging with it and by engaging I mean evaluating, analyzing and thinking about the relevance for your work. And then not joining up the different parts of the literature but just going through listing so and so says this, so and so says that and so on. And again in the way that the textbook would. So look for ways to join up, to synthesize and find value from accumulating or agglomerating the literature. And then there's the ground that you cover. Ground danger is not covering enough ground in previous research, leaving gaps in what you need for the rest of the thesis or probably more prevalent is trying to cover too much ground, trying to do everything. Even areas that are peripheral to the thesis or don't need an extended discussion. To that issue about the ground, one problem that often crops up is to do with theory and theoretical resources are introduced, great names are waved around but not actually deployed in the thesis. So again make sure that whatever you put into your literature review chapter if you have one is very pertinent to the content of the thesis, to your argument and so on. Aviad in 2014 warns against the dangers of doing what she calls a narrative review and she contrasts that with a systematic review. From her perspective a narrative review uses undefined methods of searching, critiquing and synthesizing the literature whereas a systematic review is very explicit and uses rigorous methods for searching, critiquing and synthesizing the literature. So it's about being explicit about the methods and about the rigor of the methods used within the approach to engagement with the literature. I think I'd go a bit further than her because for me a narrative review is one that's like a textbook, it tells a story, it doesn't really engage, it simply describes and so that's a big problem and is one that is often found so beware of conducting a narrative review. So if those are the negative characteristics then clearly the desirable characteristics are for the converse. The choice of which areas of previous research to engage with is judicious, it's relevant, it gives fuller attention to the most relevant and less attention to perhaps even just citation to areas of literature that are more peripheral. It avoids the possible accusation of tendentiousness, of choosing, of cherry picking the literature, the accusation of bias because it is systematic and transparent in its approach as Aviard says. It engages with the literature, sometimes to fundamentally criticize it, not being afraid to really critique very fundamentally the literature and it also draws out definitions and perspectives which can be adapted or adopted in the thesis and it does that very explicitly, it doesn't just say so-and-so says but so-and-so says and I make of this X, Y, Z, it's explicit about the reasons for engaging with the literature as it does and about why some areas of literature are excluded perhaps only in passing. It engages with and refines the theoretical, where necessary, refines where necessary the theoretical resources and only engaging with those that are actually deployed in the thesis and explains how they are going to be deployed. It synthesizes, organizes and shapes the literature in a way which is valuable for the reader and the reader's perspective on the rest of the thesis and if there is a chapter it does real work for the whole thesis itself and that's a question one should ask oneself as the chapter is developed. What is it doing for the thesis here? How much work is it doing? What kind of work is it doing? But the trouble with those kinds of lists, I said I would critique what I was just about to do is that people don't take much notice of them frankly and I would say there are three reasons for that. First of all they're kind of abstracted from the detail, they're just abstracted statements when you've got your own thing to think about, your own piece of research and so on it's really quite hard to bring those abstractions and make them apply and see where they do apply to your own work. So that relates to the second one which is about recognition and discrimination. Is this, am I doing this? Am I making this mistake or am I doing this thing which is desirable, the recognition discrimination issue which partly results from the abstraction but partly because it's actually quite hard to think about your own work and analyze it in that way because you're rather close to it. And then the third issue that makes it difficult to apply such lists of good and bad, do's and don'ts is one's own purposes in writing a chapter which engages with the literature and those need to be surfaced and I think that's one of the key issues in the book is about surfacing your own perspective on what you're doing, what you're trying to do, who you're talking to and how you're talking about the literature. So one of the key things that I'm trying to do in talking about engaging with the literature in your doctoral thesis is to move away from thinking about the chapter and the substance to thinking instead about oneself from the chapter to the author. And in doing that I've used an approach which is called phenomenography, what phenomenography tries to do is to look at a range of data very often interviewed transcripts and to try to discover what the different orientations are that lay behind the production of the texts that you're analyzing, if it's an interview transcript, what are the concepts that the speaker had of the thing that you're examining. That leads to a range of orientations if you have a number of speakers or a number of textual sources and that range of orientations is called the outcome space which attempts to describe all the different ways in a particular context that something is understood how it's defined perhaps in implicit ways. Now in 1994 Christine Bruce published a phenomenographic piece of research. She'd studied 41 students who were doing postgraduate degrees in an Australian university and she'd done it phenomenographically. She was interested in how do these students conceive of writing a literature review. One of the different orientations, what's the outcome space about writing literature reviews and she identified six conceptions from this group of students. The listing conception, the search conception, the survey conception, the vehicle for learning conception, the research facilitator conception and the report conception. Really that's a list of purposes that those students understood a literature review to be about. Now those students hadn't written literature reviews, they were neophyte researchers and I thought well that's quite a good idea but I think it would be more valuable to look at actual literature review chapters in doctoral theses, PhD and Edd and other doctoral theses to use that as the raw data rather than the production of text and interviews. So I found in doing that and looking at different theses and draft chapters as well I found five key orientations towards the writing of the literature review. The presenter presenting information about the literature that's being engaged with, the critic which speaks for itself, the taxonomist orientating the literature in a way which can be categorized into several broad categories and subcategories and so on, in other words organizing the literature. The tool maker, the approach that tries to develop tools that can then be applied in one's own research and in the thesis and maker is important there rather than taker, just taker, maybe refining tools, conceptual theoretical tools and so on that others have developed but also making them, making new ones out of those, adapting them. And then the lacunae locator, in other words finding gaps in the literature which need to be filled and perhaps are filled by the research. But I think in that orientations is actually a good word, the way that you're facing and I would say that the ideal is to look into yourself and say what's my orientation, what's my dominant orientation but in writing a chapter or in infusing your thesis with engagement and mobilization of literature. The stance, the orientation needs to change between those five so it shouldn't be just one, it should be dynamic, it should be protein, sometimes presenting, sometimes critiquing, sometimes identifying gaps and so on. As well as those five, I would say more positive ones, there are seven orientations to be identified that I did identify out of the phenomenographic analysis. Not a heavy-duty one, I have to say, quite a light phenomenographic analysis of those theses. So these are ones to be very wary of. First one I've mentioned, the textbook writer, the narrative approach, describing, listing, etc. Second one, the demolition expert, just going in there to criticise and demolish others to try to show one's own work as brand new and very different. And the problem there is very often it's only critical, doesn't see the positives, etc. and perhaps is very selective as well in the literature that it chooses to engage with. The fruit picker, I suppose, just taking parts of literature that are only valuable, only useful and ignoring other areas. So that can be, if there's a viper involved or where the examiners are reading your thesis, they can be quite critical if they feel you're being over-selective and only choosing things which substantiate your position. Next one has quite a clunky name, the giant's shoulder writer. In other words, quoting giants in your engagement with the literature, Bordeaux, Foucault, etc. We all know those names and hoping in some way that there'd be a halo effect simply by showing that you're familiar with their work, whether or not it's that relevant. Next one is Bella Figura, Italian phrase fare Bella Figura, making yourself look good trying to be the saint, the good person, taking the moral high ground and so on in what can be quite an uncritical way. The hobby horse jockey, somebody who only rides their own particular theoretical perspective and doesn't, for example, and doesn't take a critical perspective on it. And finally, the magpie, the orientation that can't really discriminate, chooses anything that's lying around, especially if it's shiny and attractive, again regardless of the work that it can do for the research. So that's kind of the substance of the argument of the book. And the rest of this book on Amazon, which is downloadable either by Kindle or as a paperback, does three things in order to help you to engage with these ideas. First thing it does is it gives examples from actual doctoral theses of the five key orientations that I listed above, the presenter, the critic, the taxonomist, the toolmaker, the lacunae locator. Then it gives an example of an abstract from a doctoral thesis and shows how one might try to answer the following questions from that abstract. So the questions are what areas of the literature need to be engaged with in this thesis, as far as one can tell from the abstract. And remember that earlier on in this video I said that one needs to think about the research questions, firstly secondly the methods and methodology used, thirdly the conceptual and theoretical resources deployed, and fourthly the knowledge claims. Now all of those things should appear in brief summary in the abstract, so it's possible to look at those and think, okay well what areas of literature would follow from this abstract and those things. The second question, what orientation or orientations should the author adopt in engaging with these areas of literature given the nature of the study as set out in the abstract. And thirdly what would the introductory paragraph of the chapter engaging with the literature look like. So that's to try to help you to practice writing such a paragraph. And then some other abstracts are offered for you to try to answer those questions and to practice thinking about that. And then the book finally points to a range of resources available on the web, resources of different sorts that can help you in finding literature, relevant literature, evaluating it and manipulating it. And I hope you find those resources valuable. So that's it then and I really hope you found the video valuable and if you want to please do download the Kindle book or the paperback. Thanks a lot.