Writing the literature review chapter of a book

I was reviewing my Twitter feed after my website went down for a few days because of a coding error, and I found a request from Dr. Sara Chatfield regarding suggestions for how to write a literature review chapter for a book manuscript. Dr. Ryan LaRochelle suggested that she look through my website to see if I had written something about the topic.

Seems like something @raulpacheco would have a post about.

— Ryan LaRochelle (@r_m_larochelle) July 22, 2019

Strangely enough, I haven’t. I have written about how to write introductory chapters and concluding chapters for book manuscripts, but I hadn’t written about how to write a literature review chapter within a manuscript intended to be published as a book.

To be perfectly honest, I could not recall at the time I got this request if I had ever read a book that had solely a literature review chapter (my doctoral dissertation has one, but I also have been revising it for publication as a book, so I can’t say that I will keep it as a stand-alone literature review.

So what I decided to do was to come to my office and check a few books and see whether they had a stand-alone literature review chapter or not, and if they did, how they wrote it, and if they didn’t, how did they incorporate the literature review into the entire manuscript.

For another of my book manuscripts, I am doing individual chapter literature reviews because it’s somewhat of a collection of individual pieces of scholarship about bottled water. For the book that is coming out of my doctoral dissertation, I have a major literature review in the first chapter, which is the introduction, and then I add a little bit here and there in the other chapters.

As I had promised Dr. Chatfield and Dr. LaRochelle, I’ve checked a few books to see if they had a dedicated literature review chapter. There’s a broad range of approaches, but the vast majority of books I reviewed put the literature review in the introduction and add in each chapter on an “as needed” basis. Since I already did a Twitter thread I am just going to paste my overview here.

While @hahriehan has a separate methods appendix, her chapter “Setting the Comparative Cases” explains the case selection process, what sets her research apart and makes it unique and (very importantly) what it all, taken in an integrated way, matters/means pic.twitter.com/rlvTf8wbzo

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 25, 2019

In @CristinaMBalboa ‘s book, having a separate, intensely researched theory chapter based on extensive literature review makes total sense. It IS the lens she uses to analyze her cases. Dispersing the LR throughout the chapter does not make any sense at all. pic.twitter.com/dDkeEQ1Lr8

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 25, 2019

Fabiana Li’s Unearthing Conflict is a good example of “Intro with LR that explains why my book is important” with remnants of LR on specific contours of the same research question interspersed throughout the entire volume – each chapter touches upon a different issue she examines pic.twitter.com/u8VIJh8Di7

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 25, 2019

Take Dr. @tammyl_lewis ‘ Ecuador’s Environmental Revolutions. Lewis offers a relatively odd approach that totally makes sense: she has an entire chapter on ideal types of environmentalism that is an in-depth LR BUT also sets up her own typology of 3 types. pic.twitter.com/xBiCMX2PJX

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 25, 2019

Now, compare my good friend Dr Natasha Borges Sugiyama’s Diffusion of Good Government. Again, for Borges Sugiyama it is fundamental to set up a contextual chapter discussing theories of policy diffusion. Hence her extended LR (though she does position her contribution in intro) pic.twitter.com/yUJEr8W2TQ

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 25, 2019

… those authors may follow the same model for their book (read @WMGermano’s “From Dissertation to Book” if you are converting your thesis into a manuscript. I hope these examples help people decide about separate LR/sprinkled throughout LR approaches to LR in book manuscripts.

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 25, 2019

I am hopeful these notes I took from different books will achieve the goal that I intended: help other authors consider how they’ll frame their literature reviews in their manuscripts. I wanted to add a few comments and responses I got to a Twitter query. As shown below, other book authors vary their approaches and there is ample divergence in how people approach the literature review in their books (stand-alone chapter vs interspersed throughout the manuscript and having most of the literature review in the introductory chapter).

Our editor has asked us to split it up throughout the chapters- makes the chapters seem less like articles. Using many fewer articles in the review than in an article, and spending a lot more time on each.

— Dan Cassino (@DanCassino) July 25, 2019

I needed to set up a larger argument so the story I wanted to tell would say something larger about the era, so I did my lit review in the extended introductory chapter. It was a history, not a social science study, however.

— Marty Olliff (@MartyOlliff) July 25, 2019

I am in the earliest stages of planning a book manuscript but this is the model I plan on following as well.

— Gretchen Sneegas, PhD (@GretchenSneegas) July 25, 2019

Agree. No chapter that is mainly about reviewing lit! You need some lit review in the intro (just to explain why anyone should care about your book, in context of prior scholarship). But otherwise, on as-needed basis only.

— Matthew Shugart (@laderafrutal) July 25, 2019

Both. My Lit Review (thesis) was 22 pp so the rest was throughout the text. And I’ve copied that ever since.

— Dr Gina van Raphael (@AliaGvR) July 25, 2019

Neither. I had about 2-3 page lit review in the theory chapter. Made the book so much easier to read.

— Tanya Schwarz (@tanyabschwarz) July 25, 2019

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