Ask Doctoral Advising

As with most holidays, Thanksgiving proved no exception and I found myself reflecting on the habits and rituals that have become synonymous with the holiday itself.  This past Thanksgiving, my mind wandered to why turkey?  When did green-bean casserole with strange crispy crisps become part of the Thanksgiving spread?  Is something that comes out of the can and keep its form really ever a good idea, let alone nutritious? 

What does this have to do with a doctoral program, you might ask?  In short, it got me thinking about the origins of importance literature plays in this journey.  The short of it, literature is everything to a PhD program, but why?  How did we evolve from the James Morris Whiton dissertation (first dissertation in the United States) of six pages to the some 2 million+ dissertations, some representing a work 100x over that length?  What importance does literature play in our research in an era when a single Google search returns thousands upon thousands of hits on any single word?

Literature, of course, provides a context to our research.  It tells us what other like-scholars have written about our topic of choice.  Which, by extension, it really further illuminates who we, as scholar-researchers, are and clarifies those conflicts we have identified and struggle to resolve.  Literature provides us with a historical context.  It tells us how our problem may have evolved over time.  And for the emerging PhD, it really serves as validation and rationalizes our own choices and line of questioning – linking our proposed work to those major works and variable relationships already well researched. 

Given that, it presumable to conclude that part of this journey requires us to fully immerse in journals, major books, monographs, white papers, collections of images, dissertations, etc., classical works, seminal theories, current and relevant propositions, empirical studies, etc. all to better establish why and how our research is appropriate and contributing to the larger field’s understanding of a very small research gap. 

Back to the Google search results of many returns, how do you know when you have extensively reviewed the literature v. exhausted the literature?  At what point do you know you, the scholar-researcher, have been diligent in examining the clusters of relationships key to your problem?