Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (19)
Similar to What do we mean by a literature review?
Similar to What do we mean by a literature review? (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
What do we mean by a literature review?
- 1. What do we mean by a literature review? Bruce Hargrave Military Education Group
- 2. Fact or Fiction? • We will have a look at three famous quotations. • Your task is to identify which one(s) are true. • In other words, you must identify Fact from Fiction.
- 3. Gentlemen, we have run out of money, now we will have to think. Winston Churchill
- 4. We’re the air force. We drop bombs, kill people and break their stuff. Gen Charles ‘Chuck’ Horner
- 5. The British write the best doctrine in the world. Fortunately, they never read it. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel
- 6. Gentlemen, we have run out of money, now we will have to think. Winston Churchill
- 7. We’re the air force. We drop bombs, kill people and break their stuff. Gen Charles ‘Chuck’ Horner
- 8. The British write the best doctrine in the world. Fortunately, they never read it. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel
- 9. The Nature of Truth • Verifiable facts – If three people are witnesses to a car crash, will their statements agree on all the facts? • Scientific experiment – An experiment repeated under the same conditions, will give the same results. • Published works – If I go to the reference you have given, in the same resource, I will find the same thing.
- 10. In other words… • If you can give me a reference, from the literature, to one of the quotes (Churchill, Rommel and Horner)… • Am I more likely to believe it? • And does it become a fact?
- 11. To review the literature on a subject… • First, we need to find it. • Then, we need to read it. • Then, we need to interpret it. – Do we think it’s reliable? – How do we know? – Does it still hold true today? – Is it still relevant? • We need to subject it to critical analysis – More on this later with Kevin.
- 12. For a literature review of a military subject… • Do we only need to consult military sources? • How widely should we research the literature? • How can we make sure we don’t miss vital information sources? • How do we know when it’s complete?
- 13. A literature review: • Puts your research focus in the context of the wider community in your field. – That community may be academic. – It may be military. – It may be both. • Reports your critical review of the relevant literature. • Identifies a gap within that literature that your research will attempt to address.
- 14. By doing a literature review, you also: • Establish your credibility as someone who has something important to say on the subject.
- 15. When to stop • ‘Build an argument, not a library.’ – Rudestam and Newton (1992). • Writing your essay is part of the research process. • Not something that happens after you have finished reading the literature.
Editor's Notes
- Your ADT gave the Churchill quote in his editorial to a recent JAPCC Journal. Just because a senior officer says something, that doesn’t make it true either!
- There is a lot of ‘literature’ out there. Sometimes, finding it is not the actual problem! Is someone’s Blog as reliable as source as a peer reviewed Journal? How old is the literature? Are lessons learned in Afghanistan in the 19th Century still as relevant as those learnt in the 21st Century? Are lessons learned in Libya relevant to Syria, or Ukraine? Critical review and analysis are something best done by someone who knows something about the subject. Is this you? If not, should you be doing it?
- Military concepts and ideas do not exist in a vacuum. For instance, a network enabled capability (NEC) may be something that a multinational company already uses (in some form or another). Mission command may be something that’s practised in a large civilian organisation – a hospital perhaps? Research into the swarming of locusts, and how they avoid collisions with each other, may be relevant to sense and avoid in RPAS. Cross-disciplinary ideas are often a sources of scientific or technological breakthrough. But how do the two disciplines find out about each other in the first place? How do we know when it’s complete? Or is it ever complete? We will look at this again later in this discussion (slide 15).
- Rudestam K. & Newton R. (1992) Surviving your dissertation. London:Sage.