One of the excellent attributes of modern technology is that we receive articles from all over the world – easily and instantly through our (mostly friendly) software system. This internationalisation of scholarship has been a grand opportunity for researchers everywhere. Now, we all have a chance to work with authors across the world almost in real time, and to read each other’s work much more quickly than before.
However, it is not always great for the Editor. For example, it was a depressing few days some weeks ago. About fifteen articles from every inhabited continent came in quick succession over 2–3 days (we normally average half a dozen submissions in a week). That was not depressing – that was good. What was depressing was that on first read, a majority of the articles had to be ‘desk-rejected’ – that is, rejected without going to experts for the journal’s double-blind review processes. Moreover, in many cases, one of the major reasons for the desk-reject was because of problems with the literature review. In some articles, there was virtually no literature review, or it was very slight or irrelevant, or simply an uncritical shopping list of selected publications with no analysis, critique, or structure. They were often not the only issues, but a failing literature review is a fatal flaw.
By contrast, a good literature review is an absolutely necessary element of an academic publication – be it an article, a book, or a dissertation. So, any thesis sent for examination, any journal article sent for peer review, must include a relevant, thorough, critical, and well-structured literature review.
At base, this is because the foundation objective of most published research is to show how the publication contributes to the scholarly or policy literature on a particular topic, theory or method. Authors cannot claim to contribute to the literature unless they have demonstrated that they have a broad, thoroughgoing, and critical appreciation of the relevant published research. That literature review must encompass the main questions, approaches, and issues – and sometimes the theories and methodology. That does not require reference to every single article on a topic or in a genre – rather, the literature review should critically survey all aspects of the ideas and debates that are relevant to the core research questions and objectives of the article. Indeed, the literature review is some of the ‘glue’ that holds your article together, and demonstrates its worth.
Developing and organising a literature review
Let’s go back to the foundation ideas. You will have done some of the overview of the literature when you began your research. How else would you know if your research will be welcomed as new/interesting and important? And then, as your research progresses, you explore methods (especially economists) or contexts (labour/employment studies/sociology … ), and emerging ideas from your discipline and perhaps cognate disciplines. Indeed, as we all discover when we are novice scholars, a literature review is always an iterative project. We reflect on it and change it as needed as our research broadens and deepens our understanding of the topic/method/theory/data broadens and deepens. (By the way, this means recording what you have read and what you thought of material as you go along. This is because you will never do quite remember all of the published material you read in the early days of your research. We always think we will remember, but we are so busy with teaching and admin, much less exploring and developing our research, that we won’t remember. So, I repeat, always keep a record of what you have read and what was good, bad, or special about it.)
Also, early-ish in your research project, you will have begun to set research objectives for your project – and the eventual resultant publications. At the same time, you begin to develop some hypotheses to guide your theoretical or empirical research. This means you are also framing the territory of your publication, and, hence, your literature review. For example, a research project which seeks to offer new evidence/insights into female labour force participation in a region of China or Kazakhstan will require that your literature review offers an overview of the big questions about labour markets and female labour force participation, as well as the nature, culture and political economy of the region, and other valuable research into other regions with similar attributes or cultural norms. It is then that you identify the gap in the published research, the very justification for your article. Finding that gap will feed into your approaches, research objectives, theories, and methods. Thus, the literature review is always tied to the research objectives and to your chosen theories, research methodology, and methods. In short, you need to explore and describe other scholars’ approaches, and then explain how and why you came to identify a different approach/methodology/method/data source.
Once you have read and recorded a lot, you will begin structuring and writing a literature review. Some authors need to be reminded that a lit. review is not a shopping list summary of ‘Articles I have read’. That is an annotated bibliography, and rarely has a place in an academic article. Nor is a literature review a dozen or so articles possibly under two or three headings from obscure publications which make it easy to find a ‘research gap’. If you only offer a narrow, contrived selection of sources, you are not providing a literature review – and it is certainly not good academic scholarship.
Rather, a literature review needs to show a critical appreciation of all the relevant facets of the published research on a topic. If your literature review is tied to your objectives and methods, then, naturally, it will be relevant to your article. That sounds like gratuitous advice, but truly, some scholars go well beyond. They try to demonstrate to the world that they have read everything about every topic! Don’t do it!
The literature review should be salient to your topic and aligned to your research objectives. The fact that you discovered new approaches to labour process theory or Granger causality on an oblique topic is not relevant to your publication. Be ruthless. Stay focused on the research question – the question, the whole research question, and nothing but the research question!
And, I say it again, always make sure your literature review is aligned to your research. Sometimes, authors offer a literature review which would be grand if the article was in the same area - but it isn’t! Similarly, if a major contribution of your research is found in the methodology or theoretical framework, then you need relevant material that will demonstrate your understanding of other methodologies or theories, and what they offer vis-à-vis your work. Discussing results in these cases would be irrelevant. As always, the literature review needs to be well aligned to the research objectives of your project or publication, and your proposed contributions to scholarship.
Thus, a literature review is comprehensive and relevant to the article’s objectives, and the broader literature therein. But there are two more important attributes of a good literature review: it must be analytical, and it must be well-structured.
To be analytical or critical means to go beyond uncritical summary. Rather, the authors must demonstrate an understanding of the relevant, extant literature, and then question or critique that literature. What have been the strengths and the weaknesses? What are the main themes in the broader literature? How do these align with your research questions? Answering these questions makes you focus on the insights and contributions of your research, and perhaps the limitations of other research. In other words, you are being a critical scholar – not a mere parrot. You are showing your reader what are the notable aspects of articles in each category/theme under discussion. In so doing, you are offering the reader your interpretation of the scholarly literature, directing their attention to the important aspects and attributes of your article. Don’t merely parrot …
Finally, the structure of your literature review is always important. As always, your research objectives and methodology should be your guide. On the week of poor literature reviews mentioned above, a few topics under the heading of ‘Literature Review’ seemed rather to be wholly random collection of publications. Not good enough - especially as the order in which themes and articles were presented seemed to have little bearing on the article objectives. Rather, the good literature review, like the good article, needs to be carefully structured. It might perhaps start with research that considers the broader approaches to labour force participation or collective action, and then it might explore and evaluate these aspects, focusing on the local region or the nature of research methods, or theoretical approaches. The structure should be clear and logical – and engage your readers!
Like your article itself, the literature review needs to guide your reader to understand and critique the previous themes and publications. A shambolic literature review will not engage your reader, whereas a well-structured literature review will set the scene for your reader. That will encourage your reader to proceed reading your article because they will know why you have undertaken your research, and why your research is important and interesting.
In conclusion, dear authors, please be kind to your readers and take time to research, develop, and structure a well-aligned, well-structured, rigorous, and thorough literature review.
And this issue?
The articles in this issue include some grand models of excellent literature reviews. A good part of the issue is taken up with Part One of an outstanding two part Themed Collection, Gender, and Work: Emerging Issues, guest-edited by Anne Junor and Yuvisthi Naidoo. Originally, Dr Tanya Carney was a joint Guest Editor, but as readers might remember, we were all deeply saddened when Dr Carney died after a long illness in September 2024.
The insightful introduction to this Themed Collection (Gender and Work: Emerging Issues Part A) and the ten articles follow this editorial. After the Themed Collection, we have four outstanding research articles and two excellent book reviews. They are certainly a broad selection of topics and as ever attest to our global reach.
The data for the first general article, Government procurement, climate change perceptions, and corporate green technology innovation in China draw on more than 640,000 examples of government procurement contract data from 2015 to 2020. Li uses a textual analysis methodology, and then multiple forms of analysis, to identify and demonstrate the central importance of government procurement policies in building and improving green technology.
This is followed by another excellent rigorous economic analysis by O’Brien and Gollan. In If the (wage) cap fits? An empirical analysis of private and public sector wage leadership, the authors explore and test the effects and interactions of caps on public and private sector wages in the twenty-first century. As the authors note, these findings have significant policy implications.
The third article in this section is from four Polish scholars, Kowalik, Lewandowski, Geodecki, and Grodzicki who investigate skills and autonomy in shared services centres (SSCs) – quasi-autonomous entities that provide routine-intensive tasks for organisations. In Automation in shared services centres: implications for skills and autonomy, the researchers challenge the traditional deskilling hypothesis, and demonstrate how in some labour markets, automation can be conducive to upskilling and worker autonomy.
The final general article comes from a well-respected Spanish heterodox economist Garzón Espinosa. He begins by exploring scholarship into the endogenous money approach, the nature of two close but different schools of thought: Modern Monetary Theory and Chartalism. In Endogenous money and Chartalism: are they compatible?, Espinosa questions and investigates arguments of scholars’ (including Modern Monetary Theorists’) perspectives on money created by the State. He critically analyses economic analysis and research into the debates over endogenous contributions. He explores the centrality and interdependence of the state, the banking systems, and wider environment for money finance and the economy. It is a piece of fascinating and readable heterodox economic scholarship, of which we need more!
Finally, we have two fine book reviews that are both provocative and offer important historical insights into foundation ideas in economics and social science. First, Braham Dabscheck offers a very positive and lively review of Geoffrey M. Hodgson, From Marx to Markets: An Intellectual Odyssey. This is followed by another positive and tantalising review of Ashwani Saith’s Cambridge Economics in the Post-Keynesian Era: The Eclipse of Heterodox Traditions by Joseph Halevi. Both these reviews reveal as much about the wisdom of the reviewers a as the outstanding publications they have reviewed. As ever, we appreciate Halevi’s and Dabscheck’s reviews, and encourage others to write book reviews. While there are (sadly) no ‘points’ for book reviews, they are always really appreciated by authors and readers.
2025 Nevile-Plowman Prize for Best article in ELRR in 2024
Finally, we would like to record that the 2025 Nevile-Plowman Prize for the best article in the ELRR in 2024 has been awarded to Professors Juan Arnadillo, Amadeo Fuenmayor, and Rafael Granell of the Economics Department of the University of Valencia for their innovative and important article The Relationship between minimum wage and employment. A synthetic control method approach. The Nevile-Plowman Prize is awarded each year to the article that the ELRR Editorial Board feels best exemplifies the aims and aspirations of the journal, particularly with regard to academic rigour, good research, and lively writing which upholds the journal’s ideals of good scholarship aiming toward better outcomes in terms of human rights, equality, and social/economic justice. Even more than usually, the 2024 articles of this journal revealed a wonderfully high standard of scholarship and, not surprisingly intense competition. The presentation ceremony of the 2025 Nevile-Plowman Prize article will soon be available on the journal’s home page https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review.
In the meantime, the article is also readily available:
Arnadillo JJ, Fuenmayor A and Granell R (2024) The relationship between minimum wage and employment. A synthetic control method approach. The Economic and Labour Relations Review 35(3), 771–791. https://doi.org/10.1017/elr.2024.44.
Again, hearty congratulations to the 2025 Nevile-Plowman prize-winning authors.
Best wishes to ELRR readers – thank you again for your support of, and interest in, the ELRR.
