6.1: Learning Objectives

Learning Objectives

• Refine your topic based on the patterns you discovered in the previous unit
• Use advanced search techniques (e.g. citation chasing) to find more sources on your narrowed topic
• Evaluate your sources from the perspective of the authors' positionality
• Judge when you have enough sources to have reached saturation

Time needed for this unit

"But the biggest thing that I’ve learned is to just set [sic] in it, set in the confusion for a minute and just, let it marinate and sit. And the more you’re able to look a things objectively, or, well, yeah, objectively, the clearer the path will become for me.” (Graduate student participant as cited in Droog et al. 2024, p. 835)

Plan to spend anywhere from 6 hours (bare minimum) to many months, ideally spread across: days to months.

The amount of time you'll need to allocate to this unit will depend on the purpose of your literature review.

Course assignment/paper

Your instructor might have provided a framework for how many sources they expect you to cite. Most likely, you are required to have sufficiently narrowed your topic to be able to substantively address your topic using only a few (10-20 is common for course assignment) highly relevant sources. Therefore, you could probably complete this unit in a few days. If your semester is longer and you have a few weeks, I recommend allowing your thoughts time to marinate. You'd still only need a few days on hands-on work, but it can help to have a few days between searching.

I encourage you to budget more than a few hours if possible. Completing this unit in only a few hours would require that you:

• Make no further adjustments your topic
• Need only a few more sources
• Are highly comfortable with using databases effectively
• Are a fast reader

Dissertation/Thesis

For a longer work, you will have longer deadlines and therefore more time. This is necessary, as refining your topic can take more iterations. Most likely you will need or be required to:

• Schedule meetings with your advisor/chair to ensure they approve of your topic. They might steer you towards additional angles either because they have a stronger background and can therefore support you better in their expertise, or to ensure you will be able to create a viable study within the confines of your program.
• Take more iterations of searching the literature to determine if you have reached saturation because you will not have the luxury of a specific number of sources being a requirement (we'll discuss this further in this unit).
• Provide more sources on the theoretical framework(s) you use for your study as well as the theoretical foundations used most frequently in the literature on your subject.
• Provide more history & background. Depending on your field and your topic, it can sometimes be useful to provide some historical context beyond your discipline. For most studies, you will want to provide at least the history of your discipline's relationship with your topic.
• Provide more depth and breadth than you would for a course assignment's literature review.

Therefore, this stage will definitely take between weeks to months.

Publication

You'll likely need weeks, if not a couple months. Unlike the course assignment, you will not have a required number of sources. Similar to a dissertation, you will likely be using the literature review to determine a refined question which you will study. However, unlike a dissertation, the literature review will be far shorter. Therefore:

• You will need several iterations of searching the literature to determine if you have reached saturation.
• But you will not need to read quite as many sources, which will save some time compared with how long the dissertation will take

If you have co-authors or are writing alongside a faculty member, you might only be writing a section of the final literature review, which will further save your time.