There comes a point in any research where you simply have to stop reading what other people have written. This is difficult because there are so many multi-branching and diverging avenues your reading can take you down. This was far less of a problem when I was an undergraduate in the 1990s because it was quicker to establish whether or not something was a blind alley: this was often the result because the university library simply did not subscribe to the journal in which you were interested and by the time an inter-library loan came through, the course was over and you were into the summer holiday!
Of course it’s far better now, you can satisfy yourself that you really have read everything that has been published in the English language that is available electronically, but the amount of time that takes! I’m trying to put my literature review together for the introduction and methodology sections of my dissertation but I just keep finding new stuff! I just found a really interesting article on organisational blogging and how it was found to give an organisation a more human voice in the perceptions of its readers; this is an intuitive truth but of course empirical evidence is always key. Then of course you look in Google Scholar and do a citation search on your key references and that’s another afternoon gone.
At some point, information overload kicks in and it’s time for a cup of tea….
schammond 