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

Personally the introduction to my thesis, or review of the literature, wasn't particularly critical. It was just the background info to my research. I saved critical review of the literature for my discussion where I just compared the results of other studies with mine. I certainly didn't comment on other people's methods. As far I know most people's theses were like this in my field of molecular biology.

I'm in a completely different field, but a rule of thumb I use in all my review writing is to bring in the critique if it is pertinent, e.g., something that affects the interpretation of the results, and perhaps something that you yourself will bear in mind/address/do better.

In my experience there is no one correct way to write a literary review - and there is a surprising diversity in how theses are structured. I'd suggest you should ask your advisor/supervisor.

Thanks for the responses. I guess I have been over thinking things a little. I will be able to relax a bit more without feeling like I HAVE to find something wrong with people's work! fract, I believe you are right......I have a meeting with my sup on Tuesday so will get his opinion also!