woman sitting on books

Your literature review is awkward

You want your literature review to point towards the major gap in the literature or the major argument.  You want to situate your study with the disciplinary context.  There are a few frequent mistakes students make in regard to the literature.

Your literature review is already really out of date

The modern internet is fairly recent, and the shift from web 1.0 to Web 2.0 changed the way information (and particularly mobile/locational information) circulates around 2003. Facebook has only existed since 2004, iphone has only been in existence since 2008, and smartphones/camera phones were not all that common before 2010.  So, relying on sources from 2003 to discuss “social networks” or a book from 2007 to discuss photos on instagram (which was only introduced in 2010), is an immediate red flag.  This often happens with using books, which are easy to find, but when discussing digital technology, they end up out of date quickly.  Regardless of what the specific intersection in geography is, there likely have been articles in that area published in this area since then.  For example there are lots of articles about COVID and social media, but what you will find entirely depends on your keywords or specific intersection since then.  

Your literature review missed all the geography articles in your area

This often happens when you don’t use the right keywords or depend heavily on Google Scholar to get your journal articles. Google scholar has a purpose in finding unique/unpublished works, it is probably not your best source for figuring out what your keywords should be.  Google Scholar will often return obscure conference publications and trade magazines which may not be peer reviewed (e.g. an article in Cereal Foods World should not be the only source you to discuss geopolitics in former Soviet countries)

Try using Web of Science (http://apps.webofknowledge.com.ezphost.dur.ac.uk/) and filter your search for articles from Geography, Urban Studies, Physical Geography, Human Geography, etc… and then sort the articles by the most cited. If you are only finding articles that are old or out of date, sort by most recently published.  Use the relevant papers from both of those searches to find the most pressing keywords and most relevant articles in the field.  

Avoid using the phrase “nobody has ever looked at the intersection of Geography and …”

Generally this claim is used when a student has been unable to find the literature looking at their specific area.  It doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been done.  Try looking at the phrase “digital” instead of “social media” or try different keywords.  Or, critique the few papers that do exist as evidence of the absence, rather than a broad claim that can easily be knocked down. This is also true for claiming “Geography has largely ignored the impact of social media and …” Because even if geographers have not covered this exact niche, perhaps sociologists, anthropologists, or a related discipline has covered it. Let’s say you were studying the production of scent and social media (which has never been covered by a geographer), you are better at stating something like: “Geographers have examined the role of smell in landscape and memory (Hoover, 2009) as well as the digital spaces emerging from social media (Ash, Kitchin, Leszczynski, 2016), but the focus on smells in material space has left gap in understanding the spaces of online smells. This research will fill that gap.”