What’s the deal with literature based dissertations?
How is a literature-based or desk-based dissertation different from a research-based dissertation?
How do you structure it?
Is there a literature review chapter in it?
What about the methodology chapter?
There are so many questions around literature-based dissertations! But so many of the resources out there online focus on research dissertations. It can be hard to know what to do! Because literature-based dissertations are a whole different thing!
In this blogpost, I address three of the most common questions around literature-based dissertations.
(1) How is it different from a research dissertation?
In a literature-based dissertation, your entire dissertation is a literature review. Whilst a research dissertation has got a literature review in it, a literature-based dissertation is, in it its entirety, a literature review.
As such, there is no separate literature review chapter in it! You won’t have a chapter called the ‘literature review’, because the entire thing is a literature review. It just doesn’t make any sense to have a literature review chapter!
(2) How is a literature-based dissertation structured?
The structure of a literature based dissertation will look different from a research dissertation. Here’s how it’s laid out.
You have an Introduction followed by a series of different chapters – each exploring a particular theme or area around your topic or question. After that comes a Discussion in which you draw all that together, and a Conclusion where you wrap everything up.
Introduction
In terms of your Introduction chapter, here you present your research topic / question. You explain why the topic is important and give a bit of background to it. You outline key terms / definitions / concepts around your topic. You lay out your aims and objectives. You describe the approach you took to reviewing the literature and you give an overview of your chapter structure.
Themed Chapters
After the Introduction come your substantive chapters - or ‘themed chapters’ - each of which explores the literature around a particular element of your question / topic.
It’s difficult to talk about this in abstract terms so let’s have a look at an example of what the chapters in an example literature-based dissertation might look like. Say you’re looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on domestic abuse.
Your first chapter might explore the literature about domestic abuse before the pandemic.
Your second chapter might draw on the literature about domestic abuse during the pandemic.
Your third chapter might look at the literature around supporting victims during the pandemic.
Your fourth chapter might explore the literature on policing domestic abuse in the pandemic.
Discussion and Conclusions
Then you will draw together your insights from each of these chapters in a Discussion and Conclusions chapter, where you explore the ways in which the pandemic changed how we think about domestic abuse or how we respond to it? What needs to change? And then you wrap it all up with your conclusion.
(3) What about the methodology chapter?
Literature based dissertations do not have a separate methodology chapter.
Instead, you will write about your approach to your dissertation within the Introduction chapter. You will have a section in that chapter where you outine:
How you found items of literature.
What keywords did you use?
Where did you search for that literature?
How did you decide what to include or exclude?
What did you do with the literature when you got it? How did you actually do your critical analysis?
How did you find more literature – did you use techniques like citation searching and bibliographic mining?
So, there you have it, answers to three very common questions about literature based dissertations. I hope you’re a bit clearer now on your lit based dissertation!
Check out my YouTube video on the benefits of literature-based dissertations!
Self-study PDF guide for Literature-Based Dissertations
If you want me to walk you through the process of a literature-based dissertation in a 54-page guide with 16 PDF planners, grab my Literature-Based Dissertation Survival Guide - see below for details!
