How Many Old Year Lit Review Can Be Used in Reserach
I recently had an email from a colleague asking me what I would do if I was examining a thesis and the vast majority of the literatures were over ten years former. Would this exist a trouble? What would I say?
Well I agreed that this was nearly always a problem in science, where knowledge-edifice is usually taken to be iterative – researchers build on what has gone before. Merely using dated literatures was also likely to be a trouble in the social sciences, arts and humanities. All the same, I said, I ofttimes saw another problem in these disciplines – theses which had the exact reverse difficulty – in that location was nothing in the literatures that was presented that was over ten years old. It was all 'new'. This could be equally worrying, I suggested.
Historic period-related literature problems arise for examiners because having either too much 'vintage' OR as well much 'just off the press' ways that the writer is not achieving what literatures work is intended to do – namely :
(1) the thesis writer must locate their piece of work in the field
With a tiny scattering of exceptions, most fields of report are more than ten years old. And fifty-fifty if they have just been invented, they commonly draw on other fields which are well established. Examiners expect doctoral researchers to testify that they empathize something of the development of their field, and that they sympathise why it is the way that it is. In other words, the researcher must testify how the field they are in, as well as the trouble that they are researching, are historically situated. They must indicate what seminal texts and writers are relevant. They must also indicate ongoing debates in the field.
An examiner may well conclude that a researcher who works with literatures that are all very contempo is someone who has, either knowingly or not, adopted a kind of amnesiac stance to what they are doing.
(ii) the thesis writer must situate the contribution that they are going to make
There are very few fields in which there has been no scholarly activeness for a long time. Scholars mostly live in crowded territories where someone is ever writing something that is relevant to at least part of their endeavour. And then reviewing the literatures doesn't just mean coming to terms with history. It ways getting to grips with the present. In order to specify the contribution to exist fabricated, the researcher must survey the field and its trends – and this means correct upwards to the moment. Presenting a set of texts that are over ten years old volition appear to examiners as an ossified view, stuck in a detail period.
Of course with a thesis, as with a book or an article, there does come a point when the researcher only has to stop reading and end the slice off. In that location's no doubt that it is admittedly infuriating for journal article writers to transport something off for review and have it wait for months to be looked at so be told past a referee that they haven't referred to something that came out in the last two weeks. Only this doesn't matter so much with a thesis, as information technology's possible to add a postscript or footnote about something new and crucial right up until the final few days. And information technology's likewise possible to have a conversation during the viva virtually why there isn't a reference to something very recent, because of the necessity of a cut-off point. In that location really is not much excuse* for not having read at least a decent number of texts that have been effectually for the concluding few months and a few years.
(iii) the thesis writer must indicate what they are using from the field as a edifice block for their work.
Very few researchers start from scratch. They always use some ideas and approaches that have gone before. This is not a problem, information technology's the manner that knowledge is constructed. So 1 of the major tasks of the literature review is for the researcher to identify the ideas and approaches that they will utilise. If there is no recent literature referred to in the review, then the examiner is likely to read this as the researcher not knowing the field, and therefore not building on its well-nigh recent developments.
Now I can imagine a piece of enquiry where the researcher wants to go back to something that happened in the field some time earlier. They think in that location is something in a piece of work done quite some time ago that could exist important to the work that they want to do. In this case, the literature that is being used to develop their piece of research will be older. All the same, in order to make the instance that this is needed, the thesis writer still needs to deal with more than recent work, indicating why and where it is inadequate, and what the significance of the older literatures might be.
BUT In that location IS NO FORMULA OR RECIPE TO HELP.
Conspicuously in that location is no hard and fast rule about how much 'sometime' and 'new' literatures must be used a literature review. It depends on the field and the topic. It's some other example of what Barbara and I phone call the Goldilocks rule – not too much, non too lilliputian. Getting the balance right can be tricky for researchers, but non at the extremes and probably non in this case. As well much 'former' literature and the examiners worry, likewise much 'new' and they worry just as much!
(* The exception here is in situations when researchers literally cannot access recent texts. This is the example in some parts of the world and it is why open admission is so important.)
Source: https://patthomson.net/2013/08/19/the-literature-review-how-old-are-the-sources/
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