Hi all,
I am a history graduate student close to finishing up and recently a book came out that somewhat overlaps with my own research topic. It does not do so in terms of interpretation, as my argument and approach is very different from this work, but rather in terms of the historical events it covers. Moreover, I largely use other sources than this work.
Still, I am somewhat unsure what to do now. What I plan to do is to simply include the work in the literature review of my introduction and explain how what I do is different. Would that be sufficient? Or do I need to go through my thesis draft page by page and add footnotes ("on this also see..." or "X also covers this, but does not interpret it in this way") whenever I touch upon a minor point/aspect/detail using my own sources that this author also mentions? This does not seem to be common in other books in my field, but I am still unsure about this.
Thanks!
[X-Post from /Askacademia]
I think it is perfectly acceptable to acknowledge it in your State of the Field bit in the intro, maybe even with a slightly-more elaborate version of what you have written here. And no, you absolutely don't have to go back through every little footnote, in my opinion, but it is hard to judge for sure without knowing the subject matters and the discussion specifically. But as always, I would let your thesis advisor pass judgment.
Something very similar happened to me. I had been working on a project for quite a while, and then a well-known figure in the field hit my angle dead bullseye with a very casual and off-hand discussion in about 15 pages in a much larger piece. This person has a special penchant for being brief but also thorough and wide-ranging. It was brutal. c'est dommage.