I found this book to be a great resource as I am doing research for my dissertation. It has helped me to look at the lit review in a new light and has given me several ideas of others avenues to search.

This book is great. It has all you need to complete a research paper at any level. I used it for my bachelor's project which, according to my advisor, is equivalent to a Master's thesis in content requirement. My advisor has asked me to lend him the book so he can use it to revise the current research manual supplied by the college. This book is easy to read and has a lot of useful tables and charts.

Great, current resource for writing a lit review. Especially appreciated the specific information about how to analyze and synthesize information.

When I purchased this book, I was looking for a potential text for a short-course on writing the disseration I'm teaching. I really expected the standard "here's how to search through the library and databases." This is simply much more that that. It's less about how to do the review itself and more about how to think about your topic. In fact, Hart raises the questions I should have been asking myself--if only I had known--and my advisor wasn't. How much better my work would have been if I'd had an understanding of how to analyze a text from various perspectives. Many texts offer advice on how to write but few talk about how to think about your question and how to fit it within the context of work in your discipline. Hart does this.

Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a literature review. Releasing the social science imagination. London: Sage Publications.

Chris Hart's guide to doing a literature review presents a comprehensive perspective on the literature review as a research tool. While it is addressed to scholars in the social sciences, this book is useful in most areas of design research. Hart discusses the role of literature in research. He explains how reviewing earlier work releases the imagination rather than constraining it. He shows how to classify and read research literature, how to analyze arguments, and how to organize and express ideas. He also teaches the reader useful ways to map and analyze the ideas that each body of literature reveals. Finally, he demonstrates in careful, clear stages how to develop and write the literature review. At each point, Hart develops a serious, well-reasoned explanation that helps the scholar to understand why each step is important and how to do it well.

Book review published in Design Research News, Volume 6, Number 5, May 2001 ISSN 1473-3862.