In order to offer new or nuanced insight into a topic via your own research project, it is important to first explore the pre-existing academic discussion. Exploring the research of others before diving into your own allows you to identify existing arguments, previously-used methods, and overarching trends. This will make you better equipped to move forward the conversation around your topic and will help you to refine or reshape your research question.
“Literature” in this context is defined as peer-reviewed scholarly research or information on a specific topic. A literature review is both:
- a written compilation of the research you’ve just done, where you compare and contrast the findings, arguments, and methods of your sources and
- the action of reviewing literature from across topic and field.
The purpose of a literature review is to put sources in conversation with one another, identify where they diverge and agree, what new issues emerge, what gaps exist, and how your question fits into this picture. Rather than just compiling a chronology or a list of publications, you are making an argument that your research extends from or builds upon those earlier efforts and addresses a new part of the problem (Mullaney & Rea, 2022).
Understanding your Contribution to the Scholarly Conversation
After finally deciding upon a subject for your study, it can be discouraging to discover that there is substantial, pre-existing research about your topic of interest. Don’t worry! The presence of existing research does not prevent you from pursuing your topic. Rather, your work reviewing scholarly sources should help you to identify a gap in research that your work can help fill. The following are some methods that can help you find your space in the scholarly conversation:
- In your secondary readings, look for questions that remain unanswered or unasked, that have not yet been posed. The conclusion or discussion sections of scholarly articles are places where authors often suggest future directions for work related to their studies.
- Identify new directions of thought in your discipline, and incorporate them into your work
- Look for ideas or events which are mentioned, but not given much attention or passed over with little exploration.
- Search for the unfamiliar in primary sources
- Even if a source has already been used in previous work on a topic, there are still probably aspects of that source which have not been elaborated upon.
Your research project does not have to focus on uncovering never-before-seen data. Rather, the best research is about collaboration: seeing where your findings fit among the work of others in your fields.
