One of the problems with literatures work is that you deal with what’s published. And once you’ve accumulated what’s out there, you use them. You might find a definition or categories drawn from these literatures. You design the research question from your analysis of literature. And quite often the published literatures inform your research methods – survey questions for instance are often based in the extant work,

People like me tell you that this is exactly what you need to do. You have to find how the literature is relevant to your study.  You have to understand the conversations, debates, traditions, trends and major developments in the field. You have to build on them.

Now I’m not saying here that this is not the case. Of course you need to do this. But you may well need to do more. You may need to look for blind spots, an area – or areas – where your view is obstructed. An area you can’t see at first.

No I’m not talking about gaps here. Gap talk is not my favourite as I’ve explained before. No, I’m talking about the kinds of assumptions that are made in the literatures. Not by you but by the people you read. And I’m not only talking about the literatures that you’ve located but also those that seem to be missing. Because what is missing might be really crucial to your work.

Now the blind spot(s) in the literatures – what is missing and what obscures your understanding – can usually be identified via critical reading. Asking questions about what’s there and what’s not and what might be.

I’m hoping that, in addition to doing the usual literatures search, you might be persuaded to do some analysis of your literature corpus. You might systematically look to see if there are any problems, taken-for-granted thinking, any blind spots in your literatures.

This may mean a reading that is focused on whether your field of research could benefit from engaging with other fields. Some academic fields are particularly strongly boundaried and generally don’t connect with work by other adjacent scholars. This means that the field misses out on something that could potentially be of benefit. Perhaps these other literatures offer different angles and perspectives. Perhaps they use different concepts and terms that offer some new lines of thought. Perhaps they usefully disrupt agreed conventions. It’s important when working with literatures to ask yourself if there are any literatures from other fields that might be helpful.

Or perhaps it’s not being comfortable with your literatures. Discomfort might mean that you read with a focus on where your literatures come from. Maybe taking as given the core material in your field actually means centring scholarship that comes from particular places and/or particular persons. You know, what you’ve found is likely not all there is and certainly not all there could be. These days it’s almost always possible to find literatures that are not from the centres of academic publishing. Those AI apps can often scour the margins pretty well. It is always worth looking to see if there are geographical and/or social and/or cultural blind spots in your references lists.

So to recap. It’s always helpful to start with the most easily accessed literatures. It’s always important and helpful to know what is most often cited and what is considered foundational in your area. It’s good to look at the idiot’s guides, the handbooks and published literature reviews. Although a caveat on the latter – while the systematic review does ask what else could be done about a topic and how, they don’t usually  consider whether there is anything problematic about definitions or whether the locations and positions of literatures are important.

In this little post I just want to say that it’s also almost always helpful to ask whether the texts you have in hand are all that could help you in your research.

Im not saying do more, but rather do different. I’m not advocating a never-ending search. Reading more and more. And more. I am saying it might be good to do a critical analysis of your mountain of stuff to see what else could be significant.

Postscript. This post is full of visual metaphors. I may have noticed this because I’ve just had eye operations and now have fully cyborg vision.