How to write a literature review - my simple 5 step process!

hello my beautiful phd friends so today we're going to talk about how to write a literature review they are long they are frustrating to write but today i'm going to give you five things five steps that you can use to structure your literature review process okay let's talk about that if you're new to this channel please remember to subscribe and hit that bell notification i'm going to talk about all things phd careers um getting a phd all the tips and tricks that i learned to finish within three years write my literature review write the thesis everything so remember to subscribe all right let's talk about the literature review can be a little bit daunting can't it okay step one of writing a literature review you need to be absolutely crystal clear on your why like why are you actually doing this research because that is the fundamentals that will form your literature review you need to make sure that you speak with your supervisor as well so a lot of times a literary review and a beginning of a kind of a project is the brainchild of an academic supervisor and they invite you on as a phd student or you apply um and then you kind of do their work and you kind of you know explore their ideas while also incorporating your own um the one thing i would say is that you have to make sure with your supervisor you understand exactly what's going on in their mind so step one here is work out your research question work out your why why are you doing a phd why are you writing a literature review what are you searching for because being absolutely crystal clear on those things will mean that when you come to write and do your um your literature searches that you'll just know exactly what doesn't answer the question what's not relevant but you really need to get crystal clear with your supervisor on what your research question really is so for me i needed to know if i could make a solar cell from an aqueous dispersion of nanoparticles so like uh yeah like a solar paint or a solar ink can i create a solar ink that would make and generate electricity when used as the active layer in solar cells um so that was my physical chemistry and kind of like surface science topics that i needed to combine and so yes i needed to make sure that all of my supervisors all three of them were on board that they all agreed on where i was heading and so yes getting crystal clear on why you're writing this literature review and getting that in just like a statement like a couple sentences statement will be so beneficial to you there's step one okay step two is when um i really start to think about the topics that i need to bring together to answer that question so in my case it was solar technology it was renewable energy it was the mini emulsion process um it was colloid and surface science and solar cell testing like those are the things really i needed to bring together to answer this research question now for you it may be a little bit different maybe um you know you need to look at the kind of large overall headers we're not talking about sub-headers here so you know i imagine literature review and then all of the headers underneath that split up the large topics there's a kind of a nice way to get an idea of what sort of topics you need is look at other dissertations in a similar field so i went away and i found a lot of stuff from europe a lot of theses from europe and i kind of looked and went well well how are they splitting up their literature review their introduction to their thesis and maybe i can use that to guide what i do with my thesis so a lot of the time research the especially cutting-edge research happens at the boundaries of inter of um subjects the interfaces of subjects and topics and so you know you need to explore the appropriate parts of each topic so that you can answer your research question and you don't need to do everything in detail but that is one way to work out you know if if my research question was a venn diagram which overlapping topics do i sort of um sit in between and then you can kind of use that to guide your top level headers another way is schools of thought so if some people agree one thing and some people think another thing you can also talk you know think about splitting up your literature review in terms of those topics um and also just chronological order so a great thing for me was to look at the history of solar cells look at the history of the sorts of cells that i was creating and go well they started here how did they get to the efficiency they're currently at and how am i going to push that beyond the efficiency that's currently reported in the literature and so uh yeah this by the way isn't set in stone yet but what but like initially thinking about how am i going to split things up how am i going to organize my thoughts really i guess is the main point how are my thoughts going to come together in this literature review and look this isn't like so set in stone yet but it's a place for you to start because the next step is going on and actually taking those large topics and doing your searches okay step three is now like now you've got your topics and your venn diagrams and all that sort of stuff you've got to start to think okay what do i actually need to search for google scholar by far is the best um i just get onto google scholar and i type in you know the mini emulsion process and look up that i look at advances in solar technology i look at advances in aqueous based solar cells all of those things is what i did and i just started grouping those uh research themes like under the headings i've already think that i'm gonna sort of like organize my literature review that way so um yeah i just take the heading and i just search the literature for themes for questions for outcomes for results that that kind of sit under that large theme um and the thing about this is you are going to generate an absolute bucket load of papers of theses of other dissertations that are written and so you need a way to organize it and it's at this point that you really need to work out for you what is the best way to organize your literature i took a two-prong approach now i don't know why but i cannot focus and read on a computer so i literally printed out nearly every research paper that i wanted to read and i used to read them on the commute to work on the bus or you know if i had a spare evening or a spare couple of hours i then had them in my bag and i could get them out and read them and what i did then is on the back of the first page is i wrote out the main finding who did it what they found any challenges if there was anything a particular note you know because each research paper needs to have something novel something new about it so i made sure that i tried to identify each one of those things and i just listed them you know three or four bullet points on the back of the first page that i printed out and then what i did after that is after i kind of got a stack of five or six of them i went to excel and i just put in that that detail so i had like a um reference i had the authors i had um uh like the topic area you know the broad theme that i wanted it to fit under in my literature review and then i just had a couple of notes like those four or five things but i made sure that i wrote stuff that i wanted to search for later so normally when you're writing your literature review you're like oh what is that paper that said this and then i made sure that i kind of included that in the notes section you know that little unique thing so what about that paper that said they used a different surfactant um to create the nanoparticles and i'll go in and i'll say different surfactant and i'll make sure that i try to um yeah include notes that are searchable it's easier said than done but a lot of the time you know it does it does really really help you just go control f in excel and you can find um you know the papers that you want to find so search for papers under a topic and then print them off if you want to or if you're fine um reading them on the computer that's fine but then you have to transform that into a little like cliff notes a little summary in excel and how i kind of try to find i mean there's no hard and fast rule right but i try to find say 20 to 30 maybe 50 even papers on each one of those subjects and that will depend on your subject area of how many that you'll actually need but um that's what i did and uh yeah i you know quite often then i would you know even a year later i would come across a paper and go oh i didn't know about this and i'll slot it in to my excel document but documentation is so very important organize you can use mendeley is what i use to organize all my stuff and also after note is another way to organize references but really that excel document that you're creating for yourself with the notes that you can easily search will be the key and will be the thing that will just make you feel so much more relaxed when you come to writing your thesis and that is almost the next part let's talk about the next step let's talk about step number four okay step number four doesn't happen for quite a while because step number four is after you've searched the literature and you've started to digest that information now the great thing is your brain is designed to pick up patterns it's designed for survival and the way people survive is by picking up patterns in nature and in this case you're picking up patterns in the literature that you're reading now you just kind of let that mole around you know part of the academic process and this is the kind of first part is just to start letting your brain make those connections start letting your brain you know see it find overlapping topics and areas and just let your brain relax and and you know read stuff and don't try to force it um just read regularly you know all about these steps and do it every day so if you're reading literature read literature every single day even if it's just for half an hour but you've got to get in the habit of reading um and then just let it kind of sit what you do then is once you kind of like start formulating your own topics and seeing the boundaries and interfaces of different papers is go back to your structure you know step two when we're looking at the broad themes is does that still make sense as a structure for your literature review um it will probably need some tweaking but the next thing you can do then is go in under each topic that you may or may not have tweet and add subheadings so now we're like literature review heading subheadings um and so the subheadings now are essentially guided by what you've learned by reading the literature by letting your brain kind of you know synthesize the results find patterns correlations disagreements you know that sort of stuff is so important and that's the subheading that's kind of like a little bit more granular of your literature review and so that's really step four is take a step back think about it let your mind make connections and then put in those subheadings to those topics that's when you'll be able then to have a structure that you can then just put words under but until you've got that structure you're going to be trying to do structure and words at the same time and potentially you're just going to end up confusing yourself so make sure that you just spend a bit of time after you've read literature after you've you know read 50 to 60 maybe even 200 papers in total just just make sure that that structure that you're about to write on is there because that will make your your kind of writing process so much easier and now that's the last bit step five let's talk about writing the words there's no two ways about it but writing can be a massive pain in the ass writing uh is just challenging right sitting down undistracted for hours at a time to write now go check out my other video which is about how to write your phd thesis in two months and it's a similar sort of stuff that applies so design a day that gets you to your result for me that was at least three hours or so worth of writing every single day split up into an hour and a half and an hour and an hour um and you just have to write okay your mind you know you will have to dip in and out of the literature and your your cheat sheet your excel cheat sheet every so often but really this is about you sharing your knowledge and so you do that uh by kind of just formulating these paragraphs in terms of this is what someone's found this is how it fits and this is how it relates to my why and you kind of just do that for each theme and you essentially want to give you know the literature review really is about giving the person who's reading the literary review an overview of the the area that you want to um research and why you're doing it so trying to always draw it back to that why to the purpose of the research will be really good and so um as you're writing about each topic under each subheading you know you can say these people found this which is interesting because then you add your own little flavor and then this relates to my why you know which is uh indicative that we will be able to get closer to our research or will help us understand this that or the other or there's a gap in the research field which i'm i'm hoping to fill with this research and so yeah that really is the writing component is break it down into chunks so i used to like to give myself say two or three subheadings a day and just tap out words right don't aim for perfection aim for words and then go back and edit afterwards perfection kills progress like nothing else aim for good get your research supervisor to look over your um your different topics and chapters and give you feedback not only on the content um but also on the you know the uh grammatical errors that they pick up you know that's something that you shouldn't really have to worry about and if you do need to if english is your second language consider getting a an editor just to pick up all those really frustrating little um typos that people can normally put in even as a native english speaker that was one of my feedback from my thesis is they said that there was lots of annoying typos in there i apologize that is essentially how to write a literature review um it's not nice um it's you know it's a combination of hard work sitting down in writing but also sort of mental uh gymnastics where you're just always trying to formulate new ideas and really this is a warm-up act to what your phd thesis and your phd research will be because it really is your brain that will produce the the unique connections that will make your research novel new interesting and add to the field that your question your research proposal sits in so yes those are the five steps to write a literature review i hope it's helpful good luck let me know in the comments what you would add um to those five steps or if there's anything that you've picked up while writing your literature review that you'd like to share uh with other people and i shall see you in the next video

Channel: Andy Stapleton

Views: 41,410

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Keywords: How to write a literature review, how to write a literature review quickly, write a literature review, PhD tips, Grad school tips, PhD how to

Id: 2Lha-pG5QAw

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020