Common Challenges Postgraduate Students and Early-Career Academics face when Engaging with the Scholarly Literature

Abstract

This article presents nine common challenges postgraduate students and early career academics face when engaging with academic literature. Data was collected from a sample of sixty-two postgraduate and early career academics who participated in a series of workshops on research methodology at a research-intensive university in New Zealand. Participants were invited to answer open-ended questions online about the purpose of undertaking a literature review and the challenges associated with the process. Findings revealed that participants held fragmented views about the purpose of engaging with the literature review, which contributed to the difficulties they faced in effectively undertaking the literature review. The challenges participants reported when undertaking literature reviews: difficulties in choosing a practical approach to reviewing the literature, inability to design an efficient search strategy to locate materials for review, problems locating relevant literature, an inability to determine the appropriate scope of a review, issues in choosing relevant materials and managing the growing volume of published work, problems in effectively synthesising and critiquing the literature, inability to organise and write clear reports, and lack of indicators for assessing the quality of written literature reports. The research presents a wide range of strategies students, and early career academics can use to mitigate these challenges. Teachers of research methods can also use these strategies to support students develop the necessary skills and knowledge to tackle the challenges of engaging with the literature.