Conclusions
The following tips aim to help writers compose more effective literature reviews and, separately, to help readers expedite their research by harvesting existing lit reviews.
Tips for writers
1. Advance an argument.
Your literature review should not read like an extended annotated bibliography or a passive summary of related scholarship. Rather, it should advance a clear and compelling argument.The literature review walks readers through the existing scholarly literature on the topic, identifies an important gap in this body of research (i.e., something previous scholars have overlooked, misinterpreted, etc.), and explains how this gap deprives us of a fuller understanding of the topic.
Castiglione and Infante, for example, argue in their literature review that the few studies focused on theater attendance in Italy read their data through explanatory models unable to account for a consequential variable: intertemporal effects. The authors explain how these inadequate models led to inadequate explanations. If their preferred model (i.e., rational addiction) proves better able than existing models to account for these intertemporal effects, then their explanations should correspond more nearly to the reality of cultural consumption.
In short, a well-crafted literature review makes clear to the reader how your work will contribute to the existing literature and why this contribution matters.
2. Engage with only the most relevant conversation.
It is possible that scholars across a range of academic fields are discussing your topic. If, for example, your paper concerns sustainable energy production, then you are likely to find relevant studies published in journals of Environmental Studies, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Law, and other areas.These authors all may be talking about your topic, but it is doubtful that they are talking to each other. Different academic disciplines encounter the world in dissimilar ways. This may seem obvious in the case of disciplines like literary criticism and astrophysics, whose areas of inquiry rarely overlap, but it proves equally true among the social sciences, whose areas of inquiry overlap substantially.
Economics and sociology, for example, make mutually incompatible assumptions about human behavior, our capacity to understand it, and the most useful ways to describe it. Not only are economists and sociologists unlikely to be engaged in the same scholarly conversation, they are unlikely to understand each other's language!
Sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu and Paul DiMaggio have established over decades a mature literature concerning the consumption of cultural goods. Despite sharing research interests and almost certainly being aware of this rich scholarship, Castiglione and Infante rightly avoid citing any of the sociological research. Sociologists and economists encounter cultural consumption in radically different ways: they assume different causes and consequences and apply different explanatory models. Like railroad tracks, these two scholarly conversations may proceed for years in parallel and never converge.
Try to follow Castiglione and Infante's example by including in your literature review only works that share a common intellectual lineage and that already are in conversation with one another. Searching for literature through Google, Google Scholar, or general article databases like JSTOR hinders this goal as you will be forced to disentangle a knot of conversations occurring simultaneously across a range of academic fields.
It is far better to lean on existing literature reviews whose authors already have done much of the difficult sifting, disentangling, and organizing. See the Tips for Readers section below for more guidance on how best to exploit existing literature reviews.
There are exceptions to this tip. Under some circumstances, scholars may import a useful concept from a neighboring field or lobby for increased attention in their own discipline by citing a robust conversation occurring elsewhere. But its successful identification and evaluation of a discrete scholarly conversation remains a hallmark of the well-written literature review.
3. Include only literature that supports your argument.
This tip builds on the previous two. Tip One suggests that your literature review ought to advance a clear argument. Tip Two encourages you to locate and review only the most relevant scholarly conversation. But even having observed the latter tip, a comprehensive literature search may reveal an overwhelming amount of research. Scholarship on popular subjects can extend around the world and reach back centuries. Even more narrowly focused scholarly conversations may include methodological tangents, theoretical digressions, and other kinds of departures. You neither can nor should attempt to review all this literature, even if it contributes to a single scholarly conversation.
So, how do you decide which literature you should and should not include in your review? When in doubt, defer to Tip One.
The extent to which an existing work contributes to your argument should serve as the primary criterion for inclusion. This does not suggest that you only should include like-minded scholarship. A work may be consistent with your perspective or it may offer a foil that by contrast emphasizes the novelty or value of your approach, but its inclusion must somehow help to advance your argument.
Castiglione and Infante discuss many relevant works. But do these works constitute the entire corpus of economic research concerning cultural consumption? Almost certainly not. They took care to include only those works that contribute to their argument.
This also suggests that Castiglione and Infante reviewed far more scholarship than they discuss in their article. It is a universal, if inconvenient, truth of scholarly research that writers cite only a fraction of the literature they read. Resign yourself now to this fate and resist the temptation to include extraneous scholarship as a means of either salvaging time spent researching or parading your expertise.
How much literature should you include in your review? enough to advance your argument and no more.
Tips for readers
1. Rely on experts' cumulative knowledge.
To better appreciate how existing literature reviews can expedite your research process, it may be useful to reflect on their authors.Contemporary scholars tend to specialize: they concentrate on specific topics within relatively narrow subfields. Castiglione and Infante, for example, research Italian theater attendance, which is a possible topic within the broader study of cultural consumption, which belongs to cultural economics, which is a subfield of economics. If we visualize these research areas as a set of nesting dolls, then the study of Italian theater attendance appears diminutive.
Consider another analogy: scholars like Castiglione and Infante reside in a small house at the end of a darkened street in one neighborhood among many in a sprawling metropolis. Having lived here for years, Castiglione and Infante are intimately familiar with the house and its street. They know which doors squeak and which faucets drip. They are attuned to the neighborhood's rhythms: its mail delivery, trash pickup, school bus, and street cleaning schedules. They have learned to avoid the potholes and wasps nests and surly neighbors. They notice new arrivals to the area and mark recent departures. In short, Castiglione and Infante possess keen insight into their small corner of the city.
It may take newcomers to this neighborhood years to accumulate the same depth of knowledge that a brief conversation with Castiglione and Infante would yield. Think of the literature review like this brief conversation.
Scholars like Castiglione and Infante rarely compose literature reviews from scratch. Instead, they draw on their accrued knowledge of both the research topic and its corresponding scholarly discourse. Their literature review offers an historical record of activity in this area: the competing schools of thought, the methodological developments, the major thinkers and works, the false starts, and the breakthroughs. During the peer-review process, still more experts bring their own accrued knowledge of the same topic and verify prior to its publication the accuracy of the literature review.
As newcomers to the topic, you should rely on these authoritative literature reviews. They distill decades of accumulated knowledge, and their narratives, organizational schemes, and citations represent invaluable leads that can expedite your research process. Follow these leads to save yourself hours of arbitrary database searches.
2. (Actually) follow the leads.
You may be tempted to rely entirely on another writer's references. Deferring to Castiglione and Infante's expertise on the topic, you might accept implicitly their claims that Zieba (2009) "finds that demand for theatre is negatively correlated with ticket price," that Borgonovi (2004) "demonstrates that arts education is closely correlated with theatre attendance," and so on. If, for example, you want to defend an argument concerning the relationship in the United States between ticket prices, disposable income, and concert attendance, then you may be tempted, given Castiglione and Infante's reading, to cite the Zieba piece without first consulting it.
This sort of blind citation practice introduces at least three significant problems--the first two are ethical and the third is practical.
First, it is a form of academic dishonesty. A citation is an argument. The scholar argues implicitly that the cited work supports the statement or opinion or fact that appears in her paper. By citing a work without consulting it, solely on the basis of another author's citation, you appropriate that author's argument without attribution. This may be "light plagiarism," but it is plagiarism nonetheless.
The second problem with this practice concerns textual interpretation. Castiglione and Infante's assertion that Borgonovi (2004) "demonstrates that arts education is closely correlated with theatre attendance" represents an interpretation of Borgonovi's findings. Following the citation back to Borgonovi's work, you may find that you disagree with Castiglione and Infante's interpretation or that their interpretation seizes on a relatively minor element of Borgonovi's broader argument or, as discussed in greater detail below, that it represents one among several possible interpretations.
By referencing works sight unseen, you may be perpetuating careless or even bad-faith interpretations. If enough scholars engage in this practice enough times, then the interpretation may, like in the Telephone Game, irrevocably obscure the original meaning.
The third problem also concerns interpretation, but the issues it raises are more practical than ethical. In an annotation on the second page of Castiglione and Infante's piece (i.e., p. 164 in its original form), we suggested that scholars tend to organize the existing literature in ways that are commensurate with their argument. If, for example, they are proposing a new method of observation, then they will organize the existing literature according to the methods that previous works employed. If, like Castiglione and Infante, their contribution is theoretical, then they will organize the literature according to the explanatory models that the works applied.
This tendency extends beyond the organization of existing scholarship to its interpretation. Scholars often interpret existing works in ways that correspond to their arguments.
Scholarly articles can run to 35 or 40 pages in length. In that space, authors may make several arguments and present various findings. These works are therefore "multivocal" and afford many possible interpretations. Books are even longer and furnish an even broader interpretive horizon. Scholars may employ these flexible works in myriad ways.
Unless your argument overlaps perfectly with another writer's, it is unlikely that you both will cite the same work in the same manner. This should not suggest that the other author's citation holds no value to your piece or that you should not bother following it. To the contrary, upon tracing that citation to its source, you may discover other, even more valuable uses for it than the author's reference suggested.
Citations, after all, are mere leads that must be followed and investigated first hand.
To trace the Borgonovi (2004) citation to its source, we should consult Castiglione and Infante's reference page. There we discover that the article, which is titled, "Performing arts attendance: An economic approach," appeared in the journal, Applied Economics. Author name, publication date, article title, and journal title provide more than enough information to drop into the University of Richmond's OneSearch database. We find that UR provides full-text access to Borgonovi's article here. Repeating this process for the Zieba (2009) article, we find full-text access here. If the University of Richmond does not provide access to a work you wish to consult, then you may request it through the library's resource sharing system here.
3. Read across multiple literature reviews.
Just as the temptation exists to rely entirely on another author's citations, so too does the temptation to rely entirely on another author's lit review. You may discover in the course of your search an article or book that speaks directly to your research question. It may be tempting to wring all your information and references out of this work's literature review. Information scientists refer to exclusive reliance on a single source "vertical reading."Despite its convenience, vertical reading restricts the potential for discovery. As suggested above in Tip 3 for writers, scholars try to review only literature that helps to advance their thesis. In other words, a given literature review, while sufficient to prove that author's argument, casts light on only a fraction of the scholarship that may be relevant to your work.
By contrast, "horizontal reading," or reading across multiple literature reviews, helps to broaden the scope of your search. While each review may highlight only a portion of the relevant scholarship, together they offer a more expansive view of the literature concerning your research topic.
To read horizontally, the researcher follows a literature review's leads to other works' literature reviews which furnish more leads to still other literature reviews and so on. This approach helps to reveal the area's competing schools of thought, historical paradigm shifts, and, anticipating the following section, classic works.
4. Hunt down the classics.
Not all scholarship is created equal. Some works are more significant than others and "classic" works are the most significant of all. Certain articles, essays, and books introduce ideas that exert in their academic fields immense influence. In hindsight, the publication of a classic represents a watershed that altered the trajectory of research and thought on a subject. It is possible to distinguish an area of study "before the publication of X" from that area "after the publication of X." Writers who publish literature in the wake of classic works may either perpetuate or oppose their ideas, but they are obliged in some way to address them.
Classic works are essential reading for those who wish to understand the current state of scholarship in an academic field. It follows that they should feature prominently in any review of that literature. No matter the number of scholarly sources your assignment demands, take care to include the classics most relevant to your research topic.
If, for example, you are constructing a literature review concerning the rational addiction model, then it is critical that you cite the classic work with which it is most closely associated, Becker and Murphy's article, "A theory of rational addiction." Scholars have wrestled with this work since its 1988 publication. Castiglione and Infante cite many of them: Chaloupka (1991), Grossman et al. (1998), Cameron (1999), Bask and Melkersson (2004), etc. Your literature review also may cite many of these relatively minor works and even Castiglione and Infante's (2016) article, but Becker and Murphy's piece is fundamental to this scholarly conversation and its inclusion in your literature review is essential.
So, how do we locate classic works? What are their distinguishing features?
Unfortunately, writers do not italicize the names of classic works or print them in bold face or otherwise indicate their status. In fact, authors may call no more attention to them than other works cited.
Nor does its date of publication unambiguously indicate a classic work. It is true that classic status accrues over time; "instant classic" is an oxymoron. But a work that was published in the eighteenth century may not be considered a classic while a work published fifteen years ago is.
When they do, scholars often draw attention to classic works with some combination of the following three conventions:
(1) To establish a theoretical basis, writers tend to cite classic works early in their literature reviews. For example, if a sociologist is reviewing the scholarly literature on class relations, then she may reference at the top of her upside-down literature review pyramid works by Karl Marx.
(2) Rather than citing them in parentheses or a footnote, scholars often will devote space in the body of their text to relatively lengthy discussions of classic works.
(3) Writers may refer to the classic theory or model as the "[author or authors'] model." For instance, a scholar may discuss Karl Popper's Popperian Falsification or Thomas Kuhn's Kuhnian Paradigm Shift or, as Castiglione and Infante do in the preceding excerpt, Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy's Becker and Murphy Model.
Given that not all literature reviews employ these conventions and that references to classic works otherwise may be difficult to distinguish from references to non-classic works, it can be challenging in an isolated article or book to recognize them. Put differently, vertical reading (i.e., interpreting from a single source) is unlikely to disclose classic works.
More savvy researchers read across multiple sources. Returning again to the rational addiction model, Chaloupka (1991), Grossman et al. (1998), Cameron (1999), Bask and Melkersson (2004), and other pieces that engage with the theory all are likely to cite Becker and Murphy's (1988) landmark article. By revealing coincident references, horizontal reading calls attention to the enduring core of classics around which scholarship in the area revolves.
Final thoughts
Literature reviews are difficult. For everyone. Forever. Expedient scholarly research requires a set of skills hard-won. So too does persuasive academic writing. The literature review demands both: it asks the author to reorganize and filter exhaustive research through a clear and concise argument. It can take years, even decades, to master.
You are new to this, and as with all new things, you are likely to fail before you succeed. Especially those students to whom new academic skills otherwise come easily may feel discouraged. Please be patient with yourself. Know that you are equal to this, even if does not yet feel that way.
There exists only one unfailing route to greater proficiency at reading and writing literature reviews: reading and writing literature reviews. This digital project placed a hand on your shoulder and walked you down the dock, but now you must dive in and brave the waters yourself.
Bon courage!