Developing Critical Thinking 75
tral problem, but you do not need not to write about all of them in full. Keep in
mind the aim and scope of your thesis: How does what you are reading relate to
achieving these?
As you read, write: the act of writing forces you to come to grips with conflict-
ing ideas and focus your attention on the most important arguments. Eventually,
you will gain a sense of what parts of the previous research are leading you towards
possible ways of dealing with your problem. As you develop a stronger sense of
the field, strive to filter the good from the bad. What you are doing at this point
is creating an internal set of criteria on which to accept or reject arguments and,
through this process, you are developing the skills of critical thinking. By now you
will probably have written many fragments and mini-reviews, and it is time to write
a serious first draft of your ‘critical review of existing theory’. Before you trium-
phantly hand this to your supervisor for criticism, it’s a good idea to put it aside for
a week or so and work on something else. Then come back to it and try to rework
it into a second draft in which you attempt to articulate the criteria you have been
developing, and demonstrate to readers just how sharp your criticisms are. Share
your work with colleagues and read their work too.
That is, you should read, and think, like an examiner. With experience, research-
ers accumulate a toolbox of questions that they use to evaluate the work of others,
and of observations of common ways in which other work is flawed. Consciously
building this toolbox can help us become better at critical thinking.
Effective critical thinking depends on effective reading. For me, reading a piece
of research literature seems to fall into phases. The first phase, counter-intuitively,
is fairly uncritical. I try to get a sense of what the researchers were trying to do and
whether the problem is genuinely interesting,^1 and then to understand how they
undertook the work. Once I have a broad grasp of what a paper is about, I begin to
look at issues such as whether the results really support the conclusions and whether
the experiments look robust. A big question is whether the work is significant; some
papers are genuinely remarkable, but most are an incremental contribution and need
to be analyzed from that perspective. In considering whether the work is depend-
able, it also helps to consider the reputation of the authors, which may seem un-
fair—anyone can do great work—but a senior researcher is unlikely to knowingly
put their name to flaky or insignificant work, while a more junior researcher may be
desperate for any kind of publication.
Some papers are plain wrong or misguided. The fact that they are published
means that someone believed in them, and it is certainly the case that high-impact
journals are more trustworthy than fringe publications, but you should always be
sceptical. It is up to the author to convince you that the work is correct. At the same
time, a paper can have strong results even if you don’t understand it.
(^1) All too often the answers to these questions are ‘they don’t seem to know themselves’ and ‘no’.
I’m not kidding—it is remarkable how often researchers don’t appear to have a clear idea of why
they are doing a particular piece of work.