How to do a Literature Review | Step by Step | PhD Thesis Writing

hello everyone and welcome back to my channel I'm very excited to film this video today because a lot of people have been asking me about how I actually go about the lit review process how do I know what kind of papers to look for and things like that so this video is kind of like my step by step process for the lit review and coming up with the actual information that is going to be in the different paragraphs so structuring it how I find out what are the different topics and like the different coming up with the different subtopics and then doing you know research based on that to determine what are the main points and then coming up with the main points and formulating a paragraph around those so it's kind of just like my step by step structure for how I go about the lit review and yeah I'm really excited about this video and if you guys are as well then please give it a thumbs up because it really helps me out in the algorithm and I'm so thankful for everybody who has been you know life of my videos and commenting and subscribing because it helps me out so much with my channel we're getting close to entice and subscribers which means that I'll be able to get the community tab which means we could kind of interact a lot more which would be really great so I would really appreciate it if you guys would subscribe and if you want to see more videos like this be sure to turn on the notification bell to all notifications but you know what I have new videos I'm going to take you through this video today on my laptop in a like word document or pages on my case of like coming up with the different ideas for my lit review so hopefully this video is helpful to you guys and yeah I let me know in the comments below if this is something that you can use and if it's been helpful and I will just get right into it so we are starting with the chapter heading just so that we can have a bit of organization to this document so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to write out the main headings of this chapter so the main sort of themes that I expect to have in my pieces overall the main main chapters that I'll have and the related work sections that are needed for that so I'm going to write out those headings that I know already as being injury prediction and Prevention and race time prediction training session classification Fitness estimation and what else and personalized training programs and those aren't necessarily going to be the definite ones it's just these are ones that I already have an idea of how they would go and they are likely to be main chapters of my thesis but it's unknown necessarily right now if that's going to be the case and but anyway so that's the first step is I have these as separate headings just like this is almost like a blurb section to go back to for this so I'm going to choose one of these I'm just going to change all my font and stuff just that this is a bit nicer to look at okay and then I'm just going to have a new page and I'm going to pick one of these main chapters and I haven't decided really yet if this is going to be one full chapter with my related work or if it's going to be more of a related work section in each main chapter of my thesis that's not really decided yet but it doesn't really matter it doesn't really change anything or how I'm going to go about it so you can see the first step here is to pick one of your subtopics or one of your general main topics so I picked injury prevention prediction and prevention as my main topic to work on today and the next thing that I want to do is think about some sub topics or questions for this that I might have so the different questions I have for this topic is firstly you know how how often do runners become injured so obviously my research is related to runners but this could be I could make it more general and talk about sports injuries in general but I don't think that's really necessary for this so first question being how frequent are running what ended injuries so that's the first thing that I wanted to find out second thing would be what art and that the main point of this first point will be kind of providing a motivation for this research is obviously if running related injuries are very very infrequent then there's not really much point in doing this research however I already know that running related injuries are very common lots of people become injured when they're running specifically for longer distances like marathons but you know it's just the idea that you have to kind of go about this process and find your determination of motivation for it first so the first wouldn't be like the motivation for why this is important and when I find out through literature search - running related injuries are very high and particularly it is so for marathon winners the second question I have would be what are the risk factors for related injuries so that'll be good because part that'll kind of answer the sort of prediction part of things like can we predict injuries if we know the risk factors for running related injuries then we should be able to predict them based on a runners factors that they have and then the next question I have is are there good prevention techniques but these questions don't have to be well phrased or anything this is just a general idea so I'm thinking if there's already well established prevention then you know I there's not necessarily much that I can do except for recommend that they follow those things so determining if there are good prevention techniques already that would be useful because it means that all I would need to do in my research would be to find a way to predict the runners injury and then recommend whatever prevention program would suit them and then the last topic will be have what are the advances exist in computer science so that's basically because mine my topic is you know using computer science machine learning techniques to solve these types of problems then it's important for me to know what has been done so far and computer science actually might change that to that yeah that makes more sense and so you can see the first three questions here are more related to the sport science aspect of it and like the general understanding of this issue like our running related injuries common what risk factors exist and what prevention methods are right there already and then what has been done so far in computer science so those are the kind of things that I want to find out through this literature review and for this specific topic I want to find out those questions like I want to answer these so it's likely that each of these will end up being their own paragraph for this part of the lit review and that's kind of what I expect is that I can come up with these subtopics and then each paragraph have it has its own subtopic and now it depends like there might be some that take up a lot of space and you end up needing a much larger one but this is the general idea so far so the next thing then since you've already chosen our general topic and we've come up with some subtopics the next thing that I would like to do is determine they pick one of the subtopics and work on those so I'm going to pick how frequent are running what I did injuries and these are the things that we want to find out through our first search so now is the point that I've tried to come up with all of the keywords for this topic so running my marathon runner marathoner so trying to come up with the different words that could be associated with this topic and running related injury or eye injury incidence frequency in terms of injury just like those kinds of things so I'm not going to go through this full brainstorming of keywords um but I would like to have this document kind of organized just so that you can see it a bit so general topic so just organizing this document a little bit better so that you can follow along a bit more um and that it means that you'll be able to do something like this yourself hopefully this is making sense so far of how I'm going about this hopefully this is making sense to you guys so I've brainstormed my keywords we can just imagine that I've done all of my brainstorming first of all and then I will do a search using some kind of database it could be PubMed or whatever it is that you use I'm not gonna go through the full search in this video I just want to explain the steps that I take for the night review so if you want to see a separate video on how I actually do the search and how you can do a search using these kinds of databases then let me know in the comments below and I will do that for you guys it's just that I think lots of people have been asking me about the general steps for a lit review and how I kind of come up with the main ideas so this is kind of the main ideas coming up with kind of steps so the first thing you're gonna do is search for your papers so using all of the keywords and stuff I thought so I'll be obviously searching for running related injuries and whatever sort of similar words to that and then with also the incidence or some other words that are similar to that and you've seen already probably my video on how to read papers and how I kind of decide whether they're worth the time or not but you're gonna come up from research with a ton of papers and I'd ask you only really to be looking at the ones that are relevant to your topic this specific subtopic you're looking at if you come across one that's interesting for another subtopic then just move it into the box for that so topic but not to be reading loads of things at once and confusing yourself but trying only to focus on reading the papers that are for this subtopic for the moment so you want to read the title and the abstract and decide if this paper is actually relevant to your topic because there's plenty of times that things become you know that things are coming up in the search that aren't necessarily related so you're gonna have hundreds of articles come up there so I might you just to read the title first of all to determine if it's relevant to your topic and then the abstract to decide if it's relevant to your topic so we're gonna read titles and abstracts and then select or reject it's fine to reject papers if you don't feel that they're relevant to your topic that's absolutely fine and there's plenty that won't be so you're gonna be reading the titles and abstracts and deciding selecting them or rejecting them if you select them you kind of put them in one folder of your Mendeley or whatever it is that you use so I would have a specific folder for injury wouldn't prevent prediction on prevention and then it's a sub folder for how frequent are running related injuries and then all of the papers would go in there so then once I've read the titles and abstracts and selected a paper you just want to do a very brief summary from reading the abstract but the summary should be related to the specific subtopic so I don't really want you don't to be including absolutely everything but just the main finding for your subtopic what is the actual relevance of that paper to your subtopic that you're looking into so to be very very brief like a couple of sentences depending on the paper of the main results that are related to your subtopic so that'll be the next step would be coming up with these sort of like almost like a rough draft document where you have just these summary sentences and things like that and then you'll end up having all of these on the one page and you can start to you know make some consensus from it but first of all the next thing that we're going to do is do a citation tracing so search through the selected papers and who cited the selected papers and who is cited by them so basically looking for the papers that are referenced by the papers that you've chosen as well as look at the references dot site look at the papers that's like the chosen papers so you can do that using Google Scholar if you look up a paper you can look at who's cited them and stuff with that and you can do the same thing with things like ResearchGate plenty of different websites that you can do this sort of citation tracing with and this will help you find more papers so you might find that you've had a paper from 2010 and it's a really good one and then doing a citation tracing on that finding all of the papers that have since referenced that paper will be very useful because you can then find more new information about your topic so I think that's a really good thing to do so you want to do the citation tracing and then essentially go back to step one here until you're out aids until you're out of place where you don't take any more new papers where you've kind of reached the point where you've gotten all the papers you think you can get for this topic okay so that's the search part of things and once you've done that you can go on to the reading phase and again I have a video about how I read papers and important note here is decide hat like what parts of the paper what sections of the paper are relevant to your subtopic so what I mean by that is for example looking at injury prediction and prevention this specific subtopic of how frequent running related injuries are that's something more that I just want to get the scope of I want to understand how frequent these these running related injuries are my research is not involved in going out and doing the same kinds of research that the people who are written these papers and you know conducted these studies have done that's not what my research is about so for this topic it's more important for me to have an understanding of how frequent are these injuries as opposed to the methods that were taken to collect all of this information if that makes sense whereas somebody who is actually studying this kind of injury as their entire study and they're more interested in these sports science aspect of things then it's going to be more important for them to know the methodology for the section that I've chosen here what has been done so far in computer science that's going to be the kind of subtopic that is extremely relevant for my work and I'm going to need to be very very comfortable with the methodology sections for those papers compared to some of the other ones where I do need to understand the methodology but I don't need to know the absolute ins and outs of it because I'm not going to be employing those strategies myself so basically you're gonna go through the paper you're gonna read and get a good understanding of the paper and for some of them it's going to be more about the results and for others it's going to be more about the methods and those kinds of things so yeah and then during that you'll probably add to your summary document a bit more depending on what you find as well you need to think as well from the citation tracing like you have to think when you're doing citation tracing you want to just be a bit careful with some things because you can end up with thousands of documents if you go through too too much with this so for example if if you've got a systematic review of 50 papers you don't need to go back and then read all of those 50 papers to understand the systematic review in that case it's perfectly fine to just relate to the systematic review and then when you're reading through that systematic review if you come across anything that's specifically relevant that you would like to look at more then you go back and find those papers but otherwise it's not really necessary to do that so I just want to make that point out there that you know it is possible for you to get completely overwhelmed with reading and it's not what your research is entirely about what you should do in the research is more find out what needs to be done and make a plan for how to do that you know it should be your understanding of what's missing and you know you don't need to read every single paper that's referenced by a systematic review to understand that so I hope that makes sense so basically I do the reading in the way that suits you and for this kind of work what suits me is looking a lot at the results sections and getting a brief a general overview of papers that I don't necessarily want to do something similar to so for these topics it's more about understanding the state of affairs with this aspect of sports science and then when I move on to computer science it's going to be very much needing to understand every part of the methodology section so once you've done that and you've kind of put together your some document you want to then come up with the main points so read through your summary document which shouldn't have too much in it like some you'll find a lot of the stuff that you find is all the same thing so examples of main points that I can come up with from doing my review of this topic is just gonna get some bullet points that's a bit clearer the things that I've seen so far is incidence of running related injury is high for runners of all distances so that might be a lot of different points from a lot of different papers all together that I now have this one general point of this and then it like I could have a ton of references stacking up behind that from the different papers I've read that have all said the same thing and then I'm gonna have another couple of points so ultra marathoners so those are people who do like 30 plus mile runs marathoners experience a high rate of injuries requiring medical care that's another point there's a u-shaped relationship between time oh what's it called time loss injuries so those are injuries where you need to take time off but you don't necessarily need to go to the hospital so there's a u-shaped relationship between time loss injuries and running distance which that is obviously going to be relevant because marathoners would be at the right side of that you shape which means they're quite high for running round injuries so that's obviously a relevant point highest for novice runners so that means that new runners experienced the highest amount running related injuries which might be expected because obviously you can expect that somebody who's just started running it's going to be more prone to injury if they don't really know what they're doing and then the last point that I have is injury incurrence is related to dropping out of running so these are the main points that I offend and they do flow quite well in this order um so far so you can already see that this might be putting together a hundred different sentences in my summary document and I've come up with these six sort of main points and these will make up the main parts of my first paragraph which will be about the incidence of running related injuries and then the next thing that you need to add is a topic sentence and a concluding sentence and then I'll pretty much have my first paragraph ready to go so if you want to see I'm going to do a future video about like sentence structure like grammar things like that the kind of things that you need to know for academic writing but this is just sort of a general ideas that you have your scent your paragraph with your main points and then you have to add a topic sentence so I can introductory kind of sentence that makes people when they read this first sentence they understand what you're going to be talking about in the paragraph and then there's a concluding sentence which generally in your literature review your concluding sentences should kind of highlight the lack or the gap that exists content like still in literature so our topic sentence here is going to be running is taxing on the body and then I can go into the next point pretty fast like this is just an idea it's not necessarily going to be how things are but it's just that you have the idea of how it work and then my concluding sentence is a clear comprehension of the risk factors associated it's developing a running related injury and injury prevention measures are crucial for the health and safety health safety on motivation of Rene's so I'm going to just ring through this you can have an understanding of how my paragraph is gonna look so even though this isn't set in stone unlike these points will be expanded on it's just a general idea as you can see of how it would work so first point my topic sentence running is taxing on the body the incidence of running related injury is high for runners of all distances ultra marathoners experienced a high rate of injuries requiring medical care there's a u-shaped relationship between time loss injuries and running distance running related injury incurrence is highest for novice runners which might be expected injury occurrence has been related to dropping out of running so a clear comprehension of the risk factors associated with developing or or I and injury prevention measures are crucial for the health and safety and motivation of runners so I hope you've been understanding now of how I went about this so the different steps that were taken to get to this point so mouthing out my main topics and then choosing one of these delving into what these subtopics were and then picking one of these then doing a brainstorm of some keywords for this specific subtopic doing a search which involves using the keywords that we've had before reading the titles and abstracts and selecting some papers doing a summary of the paper just from reading the abstract doing a citation tracing to come up with some more papers that are relevant that are different to what you find so far and then doing the reading of your papers that you've chosen and adding to that summary document and then from there coming up with the main points aggregating together things that you've seen from different papers into main points and then linking those with a topic sentence and a concluding sentence and you can see that my concluding sentence is going to flow quite nicely into the next section which is the risk factors and then the following section which is the prevention so it's like this first paragraph sort of highlights the motivation for my research into injury prediction and prevention because it talks about how you know why is this necessary well because injuries are very common for runners and then the next it flows into the next two steps which is the prediction and prevention and then the final point which is all about how the computer science aspects have come about things so far so that is it for this video I'm going to I'm going to share this with you somehow I don't really know how I'm going to do that but maybe I'll just include it as a PDF I don't know okay I'll see how I can do that let me know in the comments below if you would like access to this and I will see how I can do that and yeah I hope this was helpful because I definitely have had people asking me how I go about the steps so like before my previous video kind of showed the citation tracing that I was doing for one of my topics and people were just a bit unsure as to how I even got to that stage where I had that paper so these are they're just the general steps that I take to get myself to the point of making a paragraph for my lit review and I hope it all made sense and I hope it's going to be helpful to you guys and again so let me know what kind of videos you want to see where they do this I think the ones that I could do would be doing the actual search for papers and then as well the office the ones that will be coming your way will be the kind of paragraph structure and like editing and stuff like that that would be related to the lit review but you can see how this would work for then the next steps obviously is like going back and doing all of these other different subtopics and then once that this one topic is done going back to other topics the main topics and then doing the exact same thing so hopefully you guys understand that and hopefully this will be somewhat relevant to how you could go about your lit review I really hope that it will be so thank you so much for watching I'm I'm glad to be making these videos for you guys and I really hope they are helpful but be sure to subscribe because if you want to see future videos like this you need to know about them so make sure you hit the notification bell for all notifications and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up because it really helps me out and I will see you guys in the next video

Channel: PhD and Productivity

Views: 28,211

Keywords: dissertation writing, dissertation writing tips, literature review, how to write a literature review, writing a literature review, lit review, literature review sample, literature review example, literature review outline, dissertation writing motivation, dissertation writing and planning, thesis writing, thesis writing motivation, phd thesis writing, thesis literature review, how to do a literature review, literature review step by step, phd thesis, phd student, phd

Id: QpEdAeRL1ww

Length: 30min 37sec (1837 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020