To Finish Your Dissertation…

Remember how you wrote all your papers for classes by mostly using the introduction/literature reviews of articles? Don’t do that.

Step 1: Collect sources

Use your institution’s databases before Google Scholar or just plain old Duck Duck Go/Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. EBSCOHost and the like allow you to search by dates and peer review status. Mix and match keywords. Hopefully, this approach is old hat to you, and I need not go on.

Step 2: Review sources

Once you collect your peer-reviewed articles, look at their reference lists. Based on three major things, you can determine if any of those citations are worthy: (a) recency of source–there is usually a 2-year delay between publication and when the article was written, so you want to see sources that are within 3 years from the day you are reviewing the article; (b) title of source–you want to see if there are titles that use your keywords and sound related to your topic; if there are, then go read those abstracts, you may want to pull those articles that work for your purpose, (c) authors’ names either-or/and journal names–if there is a journal that is top tier and prime time for your purpose, then you want your professors to see you found articles in a top tier journal; here’s the and/or if you find the name of the top guru for your topic in the authors’ names list, then you definitely want your faculty to see you have the wherewithal to cite that guy/gal!

Step 3: Dig into sources you deemed worthy in Step 2

This level of dig begins where the article ends. Always keeping your end game in mind means looking at the article’s end game: (a) start your reading with the findings, conclusions, and recommendations; (b) determine if the information is related to your study and helps you identify the article’s benefit to your literature review–if it highlights the research gap or the authors call for exactly the study you want to do or the methods are different from what you want to do even though the article’s findings could be in the ballpark of what you expect to find–because generalizability is always a study’s weakness or limitation that you can use to build credence for your study’s need; (c) once you know you decide to use a study, read the methods for an idea of how to write your own; (d) avoid the introduction unless you still haven’t found the purpose statement, research question, or hypotheses–sometimes you won’t find those things at all, especially if one of the author’s is Big Name in the Field, which means Big Name’s students got away with something in the peer-review process based on the inclusion of Big Name.

Step 4: Make piles of related findings or related methods

The books used to call these like-minded piles strands of literature but nowadays professors like to call the piles buckets. The word bucket does not speak to me, like who carries around a bucket of paper? Just saying.

By creating your article groups or piles, you have begun the process of synthesis,. Synthesis is what you need to show in the literature review. You need to show how the articles’ purposes and findings are different and similar. Synthesis means grouping articles with related methods and findings together for parsimony. Better yet, you need to synthesize the similarities in the weaknesses from study to study, which is evaluation and the higher form of synthesis.

Step 5: Be a critic

Present for each study: (a) the what, who, and how of methods; (b) the what of findings; (c) the why of the study in relation to your study; (d) how the study informs your study; and (e) what’s weak about the study.

Step 6: Write in discrete chunks

Write about one group, chunk, block, bucket, or strand of studies at a time, like you did on a paper for a class. It is typical to have up to eight total categorical headings, including a theoretical or conceptual framework, in a literature review so allot no more than 8 weeks for getting it done. You probably wrote a short paper a week during classes, so doing the same for the sections of a literature review ensures you finish a long and well-done literature review for a dissertation in a timely manner.

Step 7: Fake it till you make it

I hear dissertants admit at least once a week they don’t know what they are doing as they express frustration that faculty have not prepared them to do this task.

Here’s a trick: Now that you see the legit how-to lists above, you can read an article’s introduction and literature review with new insight. You will see that the authors have made these same lists into syntheses and have argued that their sources recommended their study or had such bad methods or research questions that their study was necessary.

You will also see that authors use and abuse their sources to suit their purposes. Everyone interprets everyone else’s findings according to their own agenda. Bias exists, which is why I strongly encourage avoiding reading introductions and literature reviews. However, when you know the game, you can benefit by seeing what they said when they cited a source you found in their reference list and already deemed worthy of your attention–trust me, you’ll see this secret in action.

Step 8: Celebrate the win

Getting the literature review written without getting bogged down for an extended period, like 6 months, is a win! Literature reviews are the worst part of the dissertation, getting it done means the rest is easy-ish, comparatively.

Couple of Caveats

For those of you whose professors bring up Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, synthesis precedes evaluation which precedes creation. Creation is what your study is supposed to generate as NEW KNOWLEDGE for the community of scholars (that’s what professors with terminal degrees are admitting you into with your final defense). New knowledge is considered the highest level of learning and the point of the dissertation, the capstone of the terminal degree.

Even though my guidance is about the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, some professors expect a ridiculous number of pages, like 50 or 60 double-spaced Times New Roman pages of literature review. Honestly, that expectation is irrational and antithetical to the parsimony professors simultaneously tend to expect. When that conundrum happens, you can fall back on the lower learning levels by presenting article-by-article content based on Step 5 seen above–don’t abstract but critique each article because professors will continue to expect you to provide critical reviews over basic reports.

In a nutshell, it’s better to write more and allow professors to grade by the pound (assuming it’s a world where paper still exists) than write less and be told you don’t grasp the gravity of the task (yeah, that’s been said to real students by actual professors).