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Book review: Conducting Your Literature Review

Susanne Hempel. 2020. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research. [ISBN 978-1-4338-3092-1. 146 pages, including index. US$29.99 (softcover).]

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2020. Book review: Conducting Your Literature Review: Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research. Technical Communication 67(2):92-93.

Literature reviews provide a sound overall understanding of a topic within a field of study and provide the context for subsequent research. Reading the most important publications in a field creates a gestalt that informs a research design and helps researchers provide the context readers need to understand the importance and relevance of new research. As a research aid during preparation for a research project, literature reviews clarify what’s been done before, what worked, what didn’t work, what knowledge gaps exist, and what must be done to fill those gaps.

In Conducting Your Literature Review, part of the American Psychological Association's Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research, Susanne Hempel demystifies the forbidding task of performing a literature review by providing a concise, powerful set of guidelines in a highly logical sequence. She begins with the crucial task of defining the scope and methods for your review, including a review of the main ways to find published information, and continues with descriptions of what to do with the information once you find it. Hempel focuses on psychological research, from the perspective of undergraduate and graduate students, but her advice is robust and will benefit working researchers in any field.

Hempel emphasizes the trinity of technical communication: audience, goal, and information. The book’s overall approach matches her recommended process to the goals of the literature review, keeping in mind the review’s audience, and she frequently reminds us that the review process must be as rigorous as the research it supports to avoid “selection” bias (overemphasizing or neglecting subsets of a field of research) and “reporting” bias (producing an unbalanced or inconsistent summary). Each chapter ends with a summary checklist that emphasizes the key points and contains multiple examples to make abstract points concrete.

The advice is consistently rigorous and logical, though I had some quibbles. For example, Hempel notes that the most commonly cited papers in a field are a valuable resource, but there’s a risk that papers on a given subject by early authors lead to citations by subsequent authors only because those papers have already been cited (what I call the “bandwagon” effect), not because of the research’s inherent value. Omissions include the lack of an explicit warning to not base one’s summary of a paper on its Abstract, and no mention of the importance of backups. (Literature reviews represent a large investment of time, and you don’t want to lose that investment to a computer glitch.) Ironically, there are few literature citations, although there are many useful website references. Finally, a concluding chapter that puts everything together within an ethical context would have been nice.

Quibbles notwithstanding, I strongly recommend this small gem of a book to anyone who needs to learn how to harvest the immense garden of modern knowledge to find the most nutritious morsels.