‘safety first’ appeal for bureaucratic reasons. Students who are
made to do a big literature review in their first year almost
always generate a reassuring bulk of text, which offers proof of
their application and hard work. Composing it also gives them
practice in writing skills, even if the text produced has (can
have) little original content. This course also makes it easier for
departments to assess beginning students’ progress, following
a maxim of: ‘Never mind the content, feel the width of text.’
In the classical PhD model, where there was little or no
formal research training via coursework, literature reviews his-
torically helped socialize new researchers into the discipline.
This past function is increasingly disappearing now, because
virtually all PhD students have masters degrees and most PhD
programmes have strong coursework elements. But what super-
visors did in their youth still tends to influence their current
expectations. Also completing a literature review is now some-
thing that students can conveniently be asked to do while they
are being tied down to stay at the university by the new
coursework demands.
But letting this period of your research go on much beyond
your first four or five months will typically show sharply dimin-
ishing returns to effort. Students often become preoccupied
with perfecting shallow, secondary criticisms of existing work.
This pastime may have little scholarly value, but people get
locked into it because they have not yet begun their substantive
or field research, and hence they still imperfectly understand
the practical difficulties of doing so. Students often write litera-
ture review chapters in a perfectionist tone, fastening terrier-
like on smallish deficiencies of previous work without realizing
the extent to which similar difficulties are likely to recur in
their own research.
The alternative possibility to wasted effort is that once peo-
ple have expended precious research time on extraneous ele-
ments, they may be unwilling to cut this material out. Instead
they try to cram it in somewhere in their final thesis. Students
are understandably reluctant to write off already completed
chapters, even if this work has ceased to connect with their cur-
rent research interests or central question. Instead they feel that
they have to commit more time to keeping their early chapters
integrated into the final thesis, even when the linkage is bogus,
PLANNING AN INTEGRATED THESIS◆ 57