Hi all,
advanced PhD student here. I am currently writing up and a fear that I have been developing for quite a while is that I might overlook something in the scholarly literature and not mention it in my literature review or, more importantly, make a similar point without acknowledging that I am not the first one to make it. I do not so much fear that I might overlook a big work/trend/idea in the scholarship, but rather a minor point made in some obscure publication.
Naturally, I am trying to do my literature research as diligently as possible, but as I am working across different languages and admittedly do not have the time to read every work cover to cover, I have the feeling that I am almost bound to overlook something (either a work entirely or something said in a book where I happen to not have read that bit of the book). I do not have a concrete example, but still the fear that someone might point this out and accuse me of not having acknowledged the work of others.
At the same time, I know that a certain "grumbling" among scholars that "this is not new really" or "someone/I has/have made that point before" is pretty common. Also, somewhat ironically, it seems to be fine for scholars to not read/take into account work that is written in a language they supposedly cant read. In my case, without being too specific, I work on the history of the British empire in South America and there has been a whole generation of mostly British scholars who worked on the topic but only used British sources and completely ignored the scholarship written in Portuguese/Spanish. For some reason, this seems to be okay.
I would be really interested what others think about this.
Also, somewhat ironically, it seems to be fine for scholars to not read/take into account work that is written in a language they supposedly cant read.
This is not quite the case. It is understandable if scholars do not reference or are not familiar with material which, for whatever reason, they cannot have access to. Sometimes this means that it was only published in a small-issue journal of which no known copies survive, sometimes it means it's only been published in another language which they don't read and which hasn't been translated or transmitted into their main language of reference. This isn't an excuse for not citing/referencing the material as much as an acknowledgement that everybody is human. With the advent of the interlibrary loans and the internet, there is a lot more material which is much more widely available.
The question is often how much effort you want to put into it - are you cool with working from transcripts, or do you need original manuscript material? Do you accept a translation or abstract in your native language, or do you need to translate it yourself? The answers differ with the field of interest and your own determination of what constitutes due diligence.
Which sometimes leads to the kind of gaps you've found in your own research - people that only look at an issue from a limited selection of sources and scholarship often experience a epistemiological closure - they literally don't know what they're missing out on, because they never look outside of their circle of scholarship.
Sometimes, you have to cast a wider net. Sometimes that means going back to the primary sources, not just what people have written about the primary sources; sometimes that means casting around and trying to see what the broader picture was (there's always a broader picture).