Writing Literature Review in doctoral study

In doctoral journey, the writing for literature review (LR) has to be split into two phases: the proposal defence phase and the final thesis phase.

LR for the proposal defence is meant for clarifying the key concepts and major issues you have presented in Chapter 1: Introduction. The clarification of key concepts associated to your research study is important for panel examiners to comprehend nature and contexts of your study, while evaluating the grasp and depth of your understanding upon what you are interested to study. Next, you should juxtapose what other researchers and academics had studied upon the issues you highlighted in your research proposal. You need to justify why it is importance for you to further study the issues and to explore potential solutions or findings, despite knowing most if not all important findings discovered or revealed for other researchers.

LR for the final thesis is meant for setting the scene and context for writing the Discussion chapter. At this stage of your doctoral journey, you should have collected and analysed all the data, and also revealed all the results relevant to your doctoral study. In this sense, your discussion chapter is where you compare your findings with others’ (presented in Chapter 2: Literature Review). Cross-chapter referencing is common and necessary to remind panel examiners what you have written in LR.

Normally LR written for the above mentioned two phases of research journey are different. However, the key concepts in LR for the proposal defence can either be converted into “Glossary” of your final thesis, or be condensed into a list of “operational definitions” in Chapter 1: Introduction.