The likes of John Dewey in the early 1900s and Edward Glaser in the 1940s highlighted the problem of a literate but uncritical populace, and the failure of education in relation to this (Abrami et al., 2015). As such, the very notion of uncritical thought was deemed as something of a democratic liability. Today a phenomenon has emerged that creates new challenges in this same vein: Uncritical and biased uses of research in layman debates about any and all controversial issues in society. In a mapping of the so-called climate skeptical blogosphere, Sharman (2014) showed that a few particularly influential websites acted as translators of primary research, and by reinterpreting it highly selectively have had a substantial impact on the public’s misconceptions on a global scale. Undoubtedly, academic critical thinking and research literacy – here defined as ability to assess research and uses of research critically – has a vital role to play here. In an accelerating information society (Rosa, 2013), the need for such academic critical thinking is arguably more urgent than ever – as is more knowledge about the “if, how or why not” students in higher education really reach these ideals.

In this article, we are to present empirical results from an ongoing research project on academic critical thinking and the undergraduate thesis in the humanities and social sciences, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2017–2020. The larg- er project builds on qualitative interviews with students as well as statistical modelling, but this particular part of the projectconsists of a close reading of 60 Bachelor theses. These student theses were identified as being of the highest quality in a larger sample of randomly selected theses (n = 809). The aim is to identify and analyze possible textual expressions of academic critical thinking in general and in relation to students’ reading of previous research in particular. The methodological rationale behind this approach is to use an authentic material that at face value could be expected to exhibit these qualities most clearly. This, in turn, makes it possible to scrutinize both the potential and possible limitations of these long-standing text traditions.

Theoretically, our work can be placed in the field of criticality, or critical thinking in action, in a specific context (Davies, 2015). We specifically focus on students’ suspended judgement re- garding what to believe and do. In doing so, we wish to add to the general critical thinking literature by challenging some of the most prevalent definitions therein, where the concept has come to be so all-encompassing that it risks being analytically meaningless. The use of a mid-range sample size of authentic student work will also contribute significantly to the critical thinking literature, which tends to rely on either small case studies or psychometric inventories and similar. Furthermore, our discussion about the possibilities and limitations of the textual traditions in student thesis work will be related to the emerging field of multimodal assessment (e.g. Jewitt, 2014; O’Halloran, et al, 2017 ) and the teaching-research nexus lit- erature (e.g. Jenkins, 2003; Kinkead, 2003).