Imagine writing 30-80 pages in which you discuss and critically analyze anywhere from 40 to 100 peer-reviewed studies on one particular topic. Doesn’t that sound like a load of fun? Well, if you’re going to be working on your thesis or dissertation, you’ll actually have the opportunity to make this dream a reality!
If writing isn’t exactly your thing, nightmare might be closer to the truth, making dissertation assistance an appealing option. With some forethought and preparation, you can get through this enormous piece of research and writing with the least pain and suffering possible, and hopefully this overview of how NOT to write your literature review will help as you move forward with your dissertation or thesis.
There are certainly many mistakes you can make when writing the literature review for your dissertation, and to a certain degree, these errors and the subsequent corrections you’ll need to make to fix these problems help with the developmental process as you’re learning to become a researcher. But, avoiding a major or complete rewrite of your full literature review chapter is definitely an aim you’ll want to shoot for, as these chapters require countless hours to research and compose. A literature review chapter riddled with comments requiring revision is never a happy thing to receive back from your chair or committee, but one dreaded comment stands out among them all: “It reads like an annotated bibliography.” You might not fully grasp the import of this comment at this time, but trust me, this is not good.
What is an Annotated Bibliography?
Writing an annotated bibliography can help enormously when developing your understanding of each of the key sources you will include in the literature review chapter of your dissertation or thesis. In fact, many universities require that you develop an annotated bibliography of anywhere from 20 to 40 key sources for your study, as a means of showing that you’ve attended fully to the structure and content of each key study or theoretical piece. Drawing upon the annotated bibliography when writing up your literature review can help make this writing much smoother, and so let’s talk a bit about what this actually looks like:
An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited. (Cornell University Library, 2018)
To clarify this definition a bit, it might help to look at some examples. Let’s say that you are completing your dissertation using a qualitative analysis approach, and your purpose will be to explore the lived experiences of doctoral candidates at online universities who use dissertation consulting services while completing the literature review. You find a set of great peer-reviewed research articles that were published within the last five years, which is great for demonstrating the current context of your research focus. One of these articles was a quantitative study by Smith and Jones (2017), who investigated the relationship between utilization of dissertation assistance and length of time spent working on the dissertation. Here is how the annotated bibliography might look:
Smith, J. A., & Jones, B. L. (2017). Correlation between dissertation assistance utilization and dissertation completion time among doctoral candidates attending online universities. Journal of Super Special Research, 33(5), 26-59. doi:10.5555.4984-3958-1-1-2
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between utilization of dissertation consulting services and the length of time taken to complete the dissertation for doctoral candidates. The sample was comprised of 458 randomly selected doctoral candidates who completed their PhDs between 2012 and 2015, from a variety of disciplines such as education, nursing, psychology, and business management. All participants attended online universities. The researchers measured dissertation assistance utilization using a scale that they created, which designated specified amounts of dissertation consulting increasing numerical values (i.e., “edit only = 1”). Statistical analysis results indicated a statistically significant (p < .001) negative correlation between level of dissertation assistance utilized and time to complete the dissertation. The researchers concluded that level of use of dissertation assistance likely decreases the amount of time required to finalize the dissertation, although they acknowledged that the correlation did not conclusively demonstrate causality. Another consideration is that their sample did not include doctoral candidates who were ultimately unsuccessful, and recommended future research to examine factors related to unsuccessful dissertation completion.
You might read this and think that this looks like a pretty nice review of the literature, and it would look great in your literature review chapter. It’s a clear summary of the article by Smith and Jones (2017), and you might just copy/paste this right into your chapter and move on to the next source. This actually isn’t so terrible, is it?
So you move forward with the next article on your list, a great study by a group of researchers who examined self-reported stress levels in doctoral candidates who did or did not use dissertation consulting to help with their qualitative analysis or statistical analysis. Here’s what you write up for this study:
Lemon, H. E., Lime, T. O., & Orange, M. A. (2016). Difference in self-reported stress levels in doctoral candidates who did or did not use dissertation assistance with qualitative analysis or statistical analysis. Journal of Awesome Research, 29(3), 54-80. doi:10.2222/4565.6678.003.2
The purpose of this study was to examine the difference in stress levels across two groups of doctoral candidates who were completing their dissertations. All participants were working toward PhD degrees and were in the midst of the data analysis and results chapter stages of their studies at the time of data collection. The sample included 372 doctoral candidates who attended a variety of universities from around the world, which included both online and traditional universities. Group 1 consisted of 180 doctoral candidates who were using dissertation consulting for data analysis, and Group 2 consisted of 192 doctoral candidates who were conducting data analysis without this assistance. All participants completed the Self-Report of Stress Scale, which has 13 items regarding perceived stress with a 1 to 5 Likert-type scale to rate degree of agreement. A sample item is “I’m super super stressed right now,” with scores of 1 (“totally disagree”) to 5 (“totally agree”). Results indicated that Group 1 had significantly lower perceived stress levels compared with Group 2, suggesting that use of dissertation assistance during data analysis might help with stress reduction during this stage of the study.
As you put these two annotated bibliography paragraphs one after the other, you think that you’re starting to see an interesting story emerge about dissertation assistance. You find this story pretty compelling, so you go on to summarize another 50 articles about dissertation consulting and arrange them in sequence to create a very thorough discussion of the literature on your topic.
Or so you think. You submit the chapter, feeling all proud of the massive 40-page overview of dissertation assistance correlates and outcomes, only to receive The Dreaded Comment: “This is a great start, but it reads like an annotated bibliography. You need to synthesize the findings of these researchers’ work, and organize the chapter into themes with a much greater degree of critical analysis.”
The Dreaded Comment: What Does This Mean?
Ouch. How can a solid 40 pages of in-depth review and discussion of 50+ plus studies be just a “good start”? You spent more hours than you can count, so many just finding all these great sources, and then spent weeks writing up the chapter. If this isn’t pretty close to what is needed for the chapter, then what exactly is your chair looking for? The key word in answering this question is “synthesis.” You’ve invested a lot in understanding each of these research articles individually, which is definitely going to help as you move into this most difficult of dissertation chapters.
But, simply presenting a series of article summaries is not truly a comprehensive review of the literature. If you notice that each paragraph starts out by introducing a new study, and that most paragraphs in your chapter only talk about a single study, then this is essentially an annotated bibliography, because instead of synthesizing the research findings you’ve simply summarized individual studies about doctoral candidates who did or didn’t obtain dissertation assistance while working on their introductions, literature reviews, qualitative analysis, statistical analysis, etc.
Although you have obviously worked so hard on this chapter already, it is going to pretty much need a full rewrite. This is why the annotated bibliography critique of the literature is The Dreaded One. Let us avoid this unhappy end, and you can avoid this by learning about synthesis right from the gates.
What is Synthesis?
The reason that synthesis is so important is because it helps to “connect the dots” between the vast number of studies you’ve reviewed, which creates a much more coherent narrative of the current research on your topic. This means that instead of presenting a series of disjointed article summaries about dissertation consulting and outcomes for doctoral candidates, you tie this all together into a story that explains what we know about the topic, where there are differences in findings or results, where there is substantial evidence in support of certain conclusions, and what remains disputed or just plain under researched. Let’s look at a definition of synthesis:
Synthesizing requires critical reading and thinking in order to compare different material, highlighting similarities, differences, and connections. When writers synthesize successfully, they present new ideas based on interpretations of other evidence or arguments. Conceptually, it can be helpful to think about synthesis existing at both the local (or paragraph) level and the global (or paper) level. (Walden University, n.d.)
A major aspect of synthesis to always keep in mind is the need to look at multiple sources at once with an aim of identifying what they have in common, which leads to identification of major themes in the research on dissertation assistance. You’ll also want to look at what different studies’ findings in terms of differences, which can help to identify subthemes within your larger themes in the literature. This examination of the topics and findings of different studies helps to group together the findings that different researchers contribute to create an organized comparison and contrast of these studies’ outcomes.
Going back to the two studies from above, what do you see in terms of similarities? It’s clear that both studies were focused on doctoral candidates and use of dissertation consulting during the research process. Both were quantitative studies, which is another area of similarly. But, certain differences are clear as well. For one, the first study only included doctoral candidates from online universities, but the second study included candidates from online and traditional universities. This might end up being an important distinction as you read through the literature, and it might help to compare and contrast different outcomes based on type of university.
Another difference between these studies is that the first one was focused on dissertation completion time, but in the second one the researchers were more concerned with the psychological experience of doctoral candidates who did or did not utilize qualitative analysis or statistical analysis assistance during their dissertations. This difference in the types of outcomes measured will likely be another important consideration when developing the themes for your literature review chapter.
Once you have arrived at an overall thematic structure for your chapter that moves from a broad discussion of key concepts through to a more narrow focus that highlights your research gap around perspectives on use of dissertation assistance during the literature review, then you can start filling in these thematic sections with the findings that are most pertinent. Again, instead of moving through your studies one at a time, you will blend them together within individual paragraphs to compare and contrast findings with specific themes. Let’s look at an example of a subtheme (hence, the APA level 3 heading) section with a larger section that was devoted to dissertation assistance and psychological experiences:
Dissertation consulting and psychological stress. Receiving various forms of dissertation assistance might help to reduce stress in doctoral candidates. Providing evidence for this, Lemon, Lime, and Orange (2016) found that doctoral candidates from a variety of online and traditional universities reported significantly lower stress levels if they received consulting services related to statistical analysis or qualitative analysis, compared with doctoral candidates who did not receive this assistance. Similarly, doctoral candidates at online universities reported lower stress levels when they received dissertation consulting with developing their literature reviews (Taylor, 2018). In contrast with Lemon et al. (2016), however, Taylor (2018) found no statistically significant difference is self-perceived stress levels for doctoral candidates who did or did not receive dissertation consulting in the literature review stages of their studies. This indicates that doctoral candidates at online universities might experience greater psychological benefit from use of dissertation assistance during the literature review chapter, compared with their peers at traditional universities.
The perspectives of doctoral candidates who attend online universities might contribute additional insights into reasons that dissertation assistance might be more stress-relieving for this population of students compared with those at traditional universities. In a phenomenological exploration of 14 doctoral candidates in education at Big Online University, a recurrent theme in the data was that participants felt highly distressed by the nature of communication with their committees (Williams & Gonzalez, 2016). In particular…
We can stop there, but if you look at these two paragraphs in comparison with the two paragraphs that you wrote for your annotated bibliography, you can see some clear differences. Notice that instead of putting a summary of a study on dissertation completion efficiency right next to a summary of a study about dissertation consulting and perceived stress, we’ve organized the discussion around the central theme of psychological stress. Notice also that we’ve worked multiple sources into a discussion that compares findings (i.e., lower stress in association with receiving dissertation assistance) and that also contrasts them (i.e., potential differences in terms of stress reduction for online versus traditional university doctoral candidates).
You might imagine how this discussion will proceed, leading up to your own proposed exploration of the first-hand experiences of online doctoral candidates who received dissertation assistance with their literature reviews. Leading the reader forward through the themes and subthemes in the literature illustrates that you understand how these 40 to 100 studies all “fit together” to create a compelling case for your own study. Showing that level of mastery of the literature proves that you understand exactly how your own proposed study will contribute to our shared knowledge of this topic.
This is what your chair and committee are looking for when they refer to synthesis. It’s extremely time-consuming to organize all of these details into a narrative by themes (i.e., about psychological outcomes of obtaining professional help with the dissertation), but it’s well worth the effort once you have that impressive literature review to submit. Notice in The Dreaded Comment above, though, that critical analysis was also called for, on top of synthesis. So, let’s talk a bit about what this means.
What is Critical Analysis?
While you are weaving together the findings of the literature to create a synthesized discussion of the research findings on dissertation consulting, you also need to keep an eye toward the strengths and weaknesses of the research you are including in your chapter. Being able to assess studies with this type of critical eye is very important in developing a solid context for your study. For example, in the annotated bibliography paragraph for Smith and Jones (2017), you noted that “correlation did not conclusively demonstrate causality” between utilization of dissertation assistance and speed of dissertation completion. You also observed, “their sample did not include doctoral candidates who were ultimately unsuccessful, and recommended future research to examine factors related to unsuccessful dissertation completion.”
These types of evaluations of studies are not meant to totally trash the studies, but are a part of establishing a sense of what is truly known about a topic and what needs further examination to clarify. This again shows that you have mastery of the literature context to which your own study will contribute. Here are some suggested steps to guide your critical analysis of the dissertation consulting literature for your study:
- Identify the author’s thesis. What is she arguing for/against
- Identify the context of the argument. Why is he arguing this?
- Do they offer a solution to the problem(s) they raise? Does it seem plausible?
- Note any supporting evidence and all of the main ideas. How does the author support her argument?
- What kind of appeals does the author make in order to persuade the reader? For example, does he use: pathos (appeal to emotion), logos (appeal to reason/logic), &/or ethos (appeal to credibility)?
- Note your responses to the reading. Do any questions arise? How effective does the article appear?
- Is there a controversy surrounding the text?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the choice of topic, the methodology, the evidence, and the author’s conclusions? (University of Washington Tacoma, n.d.)
The literature review is probably the most difficult piece of writing that you have ever attempted, and looking around for help at this stage of your dissertation is definitely recommended. Hopefully this discussion of the difference between writing an annotated bibliography and a fully synthesized literature review was clarifying, and good luck with your chapter!
References
- Cornell University Library. (2018). How to prepare an annotated bibliography: The annotated bibliography. Retrieved from https://guides.library.cornell.edu/annotatedbibliography
- University of Washington Tacoma. (n.d.). How to write a critical analysis. Retrieved from https://www.tacoma.uw.edu/sites/default/files/global/documents/library/howtowriteacriticalanalysis.pdf
- Walden University. (n.d.). Using evidence: Synthesis. Retrieved from https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/evidence/synthesis
