Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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established. So proudly quote the email reply you got from the head of the group you are
studying to illustrate how they think about a policy whose existence you have established
using evidence in published sources.
The Literature Review
The Task. In a nutshell, your literature review should explore broad topic areas of
your project that were ideally (but not necessarily) identified in your annotated
bibliography, and survey the literature on each to figure out the major features of that
intellectual landscape: the (let’s say) half a dozen main issues that people are talking
about, the key authors engaged in each conversation, each author’s position on the issue,
and the major books (and, in unusual circumstances, journal articles) in which that
conversation takes place. An issue can be stated as a question, the answer to which would
involve not merely the recitation of uncontested facts but rather the exercise of judgment,
the statement of opinion, or the expression of belief. It’s not an issue if everyone agrees:
an issue has at least two sides, often several. For issues persisting more than a generation,
how has the issue evolved?
The term “literature review” is actually a misnomer in this course, in that you will
be writing several separate lit reviews (perhaps 5 or 6), one on each topic. If all went well
in your annotated bibliography, you identified the key topics within the general subject
area of your senior project, and found a number of key books on each topic. Your tasks
for each lit review are to skim through parts of those books on a topic:
• determining if the topic you identified in that section of your annotated bibliography is
really the topic you should focus on in that lit review;
• adding or subtracting books from that section of your bibliography based on what you
find as you skim, and adding journal articles where they present the seminal work;
• collecting basic information and taking notes on
*the issues (maybe half a dozen for each of 5-6 topics)—not their argument, but what
they are arguing about,
*key authors (maybe 2-4 per issue) and the perspectives from which they are writing,
*the overall position of each author on that issue (labeled, not elaborated),
*the books or (rarely) journal articles (one or two for each author) in which they set out
that position; and then
• writing a paragraph on each issue in which you succinctly set out the information
above.
Before your first lit review, include a brief paragraph on your project so readers
can understand and evaluate your choice of topics. Conclude each lit review (or the entire
set of lit reviews) with a bibliography (annotated or not is up to you) of the works
mentioned in the lit review. (You will probably not include all the books in your
annotated bibliography.) Once you’ve completed all the lit reviews, you should arrange
them in a sequence that makes sense to you. Some advisors will request that you then
explicitly link them (perhaps by a transitional sentence at the beginning or end of each lit
review), but that is not a workshop requirement. Even if you don’t link the lit reviews
before you hand them in, your next assignment in workshop will be to draft an outline of
your project based on what you learned in writing your literature review, and that will
force you to think about the links between topics.