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Thesis Literature Review: Show You Know Your Topic’s Research
Thesis literature reviews demonstrate your familiarity with all the research on your topic, and with research techniques. They introduce your readers comprehensively to other scholars’ findings. It also compiles, and documents credibly, the works on which you will be basing your own assertions.
For you, the review of literature for your thesis is a way of avoiding duplicative research, and ensuring that you have covered all bases. Obtaining helpful sources for your thesis literature review:
You should check for sources from:
- the internet,
- your institution’s and state’s online and hard-copy holdings, including through inter-library loan (plan for lead time)
- Previous papers from your department on the same subject. Since many master’s level theses build on faculty projects, you may have already done this, but be sure. Much older papers may not be digitally archived. You should mine any prior papers on related topics for their sources. This can yield an instant mother-lode of references that can push your bibliography back a number of years, and offer unexpected leads.
- Your thesis advisor’s personal collection of references. It is flattering to a professor to consult sources that he/she particularly admires.
- Interviews with experts. Buttonhole them at conferences/lectures (does your department have an annual endowed lecture? Be there with bells on!)
Create a detailed bibliography to allow readers to locate these sources readily.
Frame your thesis literature review
Your introduction should lay out in general terms the aim of your thesis, so readers know what to expect from the literature. Your conclusion should sum up the state of research and thinking on your topic, identify areas calling for more work, and the implications for your field.
Putting the ‘review’ in thesis literature reviews
- Organize your sources by categories such as whether they support or contradict your assertion, or whether they use quantitative versus qualitative approaches, whether they represent original research or reviews of previous research, or any other relevant distinctions.
- Indicate what type of source each is (book, article, letter to editor, comment, meta-review, etc.)Indicate, with a brief summary, what contribution the source makes to your topic. If a source is useless, include it nonetheless to show completeness. Avoid insulting commentary – you will doubtless cross paths someday!
- Demonstrate the intellectual genealogy of significant ideas in your topic area.
- Show your thesis’ place in the evolution of these ideas
Find credible guidance for reviews of the literature for your thesis at:
