When Have You Read Enough for a Literature Review?
Many students and researchers will ask their supervisors and
professors: “How long should my literature review be? How many citations should
I have? And when do I know that I’ve read enough?”
Almost invariably, the supervisor will respond by saying
that there is no way to tell; there is just a sense of completion that comes
when the researcher has done enough work. “You’ll know when you know.” For many
of us, this feedback is too vague, and the sense of completion never seems to
come as we are always discovering more and more information that makes us feel
like we don’t know enough to do our study or to get our degree.
It's important not to become overwhelmed by the vast amount
of information that’s out there. If you really try to read every single study
in your field of study, for most fields you would need quite a few lifetimes before
you’ve read them all.
A good way to know when you’ve read enough is when you can
comfortably go through a few studies that are similar to yours and recognize
the majority of references in their reference lists. If you’ve already read
most of the work that has helped others to do studies similar to yours, then
you’re on the right track.
Another way to ensure that you’re being thorough is to make
sure that you read as much of the relevant literature over the past four or
five years. When you do a library search of the studies that match your keywords
or that fit your themes, are there any that expand on the established knowledge
in a substantial way? Read all of the abstracts for these studies, and then
only choose the most relevant ones to read the full text of and to incorporate
in your literature review. Be selective with your reading, especially after
you’ve already spent months working on a literature review.
Another way to gauge your level of completion is to send
regular drafts of your literature review to your supervisor or to other
knowledgeable colleagues. They have a lot more experience than you have, and if
they point out any readings that you should include, focus on those instead of
the hundreds of other readings that might be tangentially relevant.
In some fields, like natural sciences or engineering, studies
usually range from 20 to 150 references, although around 70 – 95 should be
sufficient for a master’s study. For the social and health sciences, the range
is much higher with anywhere from 20 – 220 references in many studies. Most
studies in these fields end up with around 100 references at master’s level. If
you are doing literary or cultural analysis, or looking at case studies, for
example in the humanities fields like History or English literature, you will require
a lot more references since you won’t need to do experimentation. However, many
of these references will form part of your body chapters and not all of them
are included in your literature review. The average for master’s studies in the
humanities is around 170 references in total.
For a doctoral study, you can safely double these figures.
This should only be a general guideline, and your particular
study might require much more or much less reading than the figures listed
here.
Review Your Learning:
·
Your literature review should logically flow
from one idea to the next
·
A good logical framework for any piece of
writing is to move from the general to
the specific, or from broader ideas to more specific ideas
·
Make sure that you fully understand your
readings, and critically engage with the content so that you don’t end up
making the same mistakes that another researcher made in their article