Literature Review

Your literature review is a chance for you to read deeply and widely in a particular area, and then provide a presentation that synthesizes the important ideas in this literature for your classmates. There are at least two objectives.

1. Your literature review gives you a chance to practice your presentation skills. You have seen many presentations in the fall term from the upper year class. Now it’s your turn to adopt the best practices that you’ve seen. Think hard about what you want to say and how to say it. Having done that, you should prepare your presentation as professionally as possible (either using overheads or a pdf/ppt file from your laptop).

2. The presentation gives you a chance to identify a topic for a second-year paper, get some feedback on your direction, and to match with a supervisor.

What goes into your presentation?

The literature review should identify and describe the broad themes in the literature, including:

1. Areas of agreement and important points of contention in either theoretical predictions or empirical results.

2. Important families of models used in the literature, or types of evidence examined.

Doing research and writing a paper is an ongoing process, not an event. Ideally, before choosing your area for a literature review you will have already had informal discussions with a potential supervisor and you would have sought approval on a potential area for research. If not, sometimes the literature review allows us to see where a common interest can be found between you and members of our department. Even if you have started thinking about your second-year paper with feedback from a potential supervisor, the literature review gets you started down the road to writing a serious piece of research by forcing you to think about it and make some progress.

You should avoid simply listing papers and stating a summary for each in your review (Authors A had the following model and data, here’s what they did; Authors B had the following model and data, here’s what they did; Authors C…). Don’t spend too much effort summarizing research that is over 20 years old. Try to identify important, modern themes in the literature. Show the forest, not the trees. That said, you don’t want to give a summary that is too superficial. Go into the details that are key to understanding the basic issues in the literature, especially if they would not be obvious to those who haven’t worked in the area. It is expected that you will be prepared to discuss details, so you should have a very good detailed understanding of what was done in all of the papers. But most of the details should be kept hidden unless the class discussion demands otherwise. The broad objective of the exercise is to foster the transition from course-work to research. In particular, you are expected to surpass the cognitive objectives required in an undergraduate exercise (that is, show that you have knowledge and comprehension of the literature and that you know how to apply the knowledge in some novel situation) and to aim for the cognitive objectives of a graduate research seminar (provide an analysis and criticism of the literature, synthesize its salient features, and evaluate the literature in terms of gaps or extensions).

You should end your presentation with a five minute discussion of where you think you will be heading. Further details will be provided during your subsequent presentation of your second-year paper proposal. But it’s important to start thinking about where you are headed as soon as possible and to seek advice from the coordinators so that they can help you from committing too much time on the wrong topic.

It may help you to understand what the seminar coordinators will be looking for during your presentation.

1. They want to see what sort of presentation skills you have so that they can give you advice on how to improve.
2. They will seek assurance that what you are doing is of interest to members of the department and that you are (or at least can be) matched to a potential supervisor.
3. They will try to see if you have learned to think about research like an economist, and whether or not you have a mature understanding of the issues (both big and nitty-gritty).

Both the literature review and the paper proposal are meant to give you the opportunity to practice and develop your presentations skills, and to get you going with a supervisor on a sensible research topic, so that you can write a research paper and eventually a thesis. The literature review and paper proposal presentations are means to the same end. For most students, a broader literature review followed by a more focused paper proposal is the right way to proceed. But some students are further ahead and may want to present a more focused literature review that is very close to a paper proposal, followed by a second iteration of their paper proposal. This accelerated path is fine, but to follow it you must already be matched with a supervisor and have reached an understanding with your supervisor about the area of your research and the papers that are worth reading closely.