Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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studying class in capitalist societies, Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto is a
classic text; if Marx himself is the focus of your study, however, the same book is a
primary document. Primary texts are analogous to works of art studied by an art historian
or artifacts collected an anthropologist. They are phenomena to be studied in their own
right and thus important (maybe even crucial) to your project, but they don’t belong in
your literature review. The issues are raised in secondary sources, the scholarly work
commenting on those primary texts or documents.
The literature review is not about your opinions on the issues or positions you find
in the literature; it’s about them not you, about their work not yours, their ideas not yours.
Granted, writing a lit review requires you to make all kinds of judgments in order to
describe their work and to decide whether it’s relevant to your project and thus belongs in
your lit review. And the books you examine don’t always identify the larger issue, so
you may have to come up with a label for it; and they typically don’t say who the key
players are, so you have to infer it. You have to judge whether an issue is relevant to your
project (bearing in mind that inconvenient positions—one’s that don’t support the
argument you want to make—are very much relevant). If you feel the urge to challenge
something you’re reading for your lit review, put your comments in a file on that topic or
author or issue, not in your lit review. If you were to include your opinions, you would
actually undercut the usefulness of the lit review; you want to be able to contrast your
opinions with those of other authors, and you lose the contrast when they are
intermingled.
Without a literature review, you would put yourself in the position of trying to
write your project in an intellectual vacuum, unaware of the relevant conversations taking
place in the various professional literatures that have potential bearing on your topic. You
not only miss opportunities to enrich your argument, but your project comes across to the
very experts you most want to impress as naïve and ill-informed. They assume that a
project on your topic will deal with the issues they are used to seeing addressed; they
expect to see certain discourse communities represented. If they are to take your project
seriously, you have to show them how you address the issues they think should be
included; even if you make the case for why one of these issues should not be included,
you at least need to acknowledge it. Put differently, you need to show them how what
you are interested in relates to what they are interested in, so they know how to approach
your project. Then they are in a position to appreciate what you are doing and more
predisposed to take it seriously.
Identifying issues. We speak of the issues in a lit review being “discussed” or
“debated,” but that may in fact be a figure of speech, not an accurate description of the
professional literature. In a literature review for a disciplinary project, you can feel
confident that scholars in the same discipline and interested in the same issue will
actually read each other’s work. They really are engaged in a discussion or debate in the
discipline’s professional literature. But when you are writing a literature review for an
interdisciplinary project, you are interested in issues that may cut across disciplinary
lines. In that case, the scholars from different disciplines writing on different aspects of
the issue typically do not read each other’s work. You may be the only one who realizes
that a larger “conversation” is in progress in which the overall issue is being “debated.”
It’s your job to identify the larger issue of which those aspects are a part, and bring them
together in your lit review (and then in your project). This task of issue construction may