Hi all,
The last post I made was me stressing out about how to start my literature review. I took the advice of the responses I received and I am now progressing through it very well. Strangely, however, I feel like I am over thinking it a little! When reading papers for my review, I am always trying to be as analytical as possible, making correlations between multiple authors, highlighting differences in opinion/method, highlighting areas that may have been of some concern in the methodology and adding my own opinions based on my own knowledge etc.
Reading back through my work, I felt like I perhaps wasn't being analytical enough, so I sought some inspiration from other thesis in our research group (two of which were authored by my 2 supervisors), and downloaded a thesis supervised by someone internationally prominent in my field (engineering). I must admit, I was shocked by how "un-analytical" (excuse the made up term!) they all were. Most read like a textbook narrative with the odd bit of critique here and there. To be honest, my wife's undergrad social science dissertation had more critical content than most of these.
This got me thinking about literature reviews in engineering; are they perhaps not supposed to be as critical as I thought? One of my supervisors has mentioned that he feels that too much emphasis is placed on the literature review and he doesn't feel that it is as important as people make out.
Any views much appreciated!
AC