Obsolete literature review

If there is no recent literature referred to in the review, then the examiner is likely to read this as the researcher not knowing the field, and therefore not building on its most recent developments. Now I can imagine a piece of research where the researcher wants to go back to something that happened in the field some time before.

In this case, the literature that is being used to develop their piece of research will be older. However, in order to make the case that this is needed, the thesis writer still needs to deal with more recent work, indicating why and where it is inadequate, and what the significance of the older literatures might be.

But using dated literatures was also likely to be a problem in the social sciences, arts and humanities. However, I said, I often saw another problem in these disciplines – theses which had the exact opposite difficulty – there was nothing in the literatures that was presented that was over ten years old.

- The Paris Review Is Literature Dead? One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old son, Noah, told me that literature was dead. We were at the dinner table, discussing The Great Gatsby, which he was reading for a ninth-grade humanities class.