When I first started doing my literature review, I used to think that the only kind of argument that I could make was an empirical one - what’s been found and what’s not yet been focused on. I found myself constantly writing “the research explored X but did not consider Y”. It severely limited my abilities to actually critique the literature and develop a more comprehensive analysis in a way that would lead to my research questions. It was only when my supervisor and examiner (& the reviewer of a paper I submitted to a journal) pointed out that my lit review needed more layers to it in terms of building up to something that I realized I needed to make use of different kinds of arguments. You can have a conceptual argument where you examine and debate different concepts and synthesise them with different empirical findings to propose a different concept. It’s possible to critique the different kinds of methods that have been used to generate empirical findings and integrate them with...