Write The Literature Review: 4 EASY Steps (Implement TODAY)

would you like to be able to write a really good literature review either for your thesis or for your research paper and perhaps you're struggling with the different aspects such as structuring the literature review finding the right text reading them quickly then in this video I'm going to show you a simple four-step process and explain exactly how to do a really good literature review and be able to do it fast so let's Dive In so before we discuss the four steps to the literature review first let's ask ourselves an important question what is the purpose of the literature review because I think without really understanding that a lot of people a lot of us get confused when writing a literature review so the main reason why you're actually reading all this literature and writing all of this is to get to the research Gap so let me repeat that because that's super important the sole purpose of reviewing all the literature and putting it on paper in your thesis or in a research paper is to get us to the research Gap and you've got to keep this in mind because that's sort of like your pyramid Apex right so imagine a pyramid you know and the pyramid is inverted we put it on its head we flip it around right and this at the very bottom the Apex is the purpose of the literature review which is the research Gap and by extension your research question so everything but really everything that you're doing in the literature review as you're going down the pyramid is to get to the research Gap and if you keep that in mind you know a lot of things will become clear as we're going over the four steps of doing the literature review in terms of searching the literature in terms of structuring it and in terms of writing and I think it will allow you to avoid a lot of the mistakes which really stem from the confusion of like what the purpose of the literature review is and if you're new here my name iskovic and I run academic English now where I help PhD students and researchers regularly publish papers in top journals in the field and if you're enjoying this video click the like and the Subscribe button so you don't miss future videos like this one so we'll be talking about four steps to writing the literature review and that first step is to find the right text for your literature review and this is where a lot of PhD students and researchers get it wrong straight away and I'm not surprised that you do because there is so much literature to read so how do you even know where to start which text to look how do you look for them you know because you start looking and you might end up with like a thousand texts and you're inundated with all these articles and and so on right so we've got to be very focused with our search so the first thing that you want to do here is to identify the right keywords and I've got another video where I dive deeper into that specific aspect but in here you know I just want to say that the keywords are derived from your research question right so you take your research question and then look at what are some of the key the words that you need in order to do that literature review right so let's say if your topic is how can online learning help PhD students write a better thesis right let's imagine that's the topic then well some of the keywords that you've got to be searching for is like online learning PhD students thesis right and maybe academic writing or something like this right but let's start with these three and then what you want to do is think about you know any potential synonyms right so one of the keywords were thesis but of course this can also be called a dissertation it could also be called a PhD thesis or a PhD dissertation right so you want to think about these alternative words that other researchers might be using right and make a list of that in a in a table right now the next thing here to remember is to also use those connecting words right I think they're called operators in literature review search and by that I mean for example amp so if you if you were just to search for like a string of words like thesis PhD student um you know and so on like you will just get like random list of papers some of which have one of these keywords some of which have three some of which have two right but to a better way to do this is to search for example for you know PhD student and online learning and thesis or dissertation because such a string of words what this is going to give you is you know only papers that have in the title a PhD student and they have online learning and dissertation or thesis right so this gives you a much more specific search and I think where a lot of people go wrong is that they have a too General search that is not focused enough right now so after the keywords you might be asking yourself well which databases am I going to use where should I search so usually what I recommend is having two databases one that is more General and one that is more specific to your discipline a general one is something like Google Scholar or web of science or something like this by General I mean that it's going to give you results from all sorts of fields and this can be good if you're for example looking at you know online learning of PhD students you might be doing a PhD in teaching English specifically right but there might be like really interesting studies outside of your field of teaching English right so a more General database will give you a kind of more results which can be valuable right now a more specific database you know such as for example if you're in the field of education then you've got for example Eric if you're in medicine then you've got something like PubMed right these specific databases are really good because they're specific right so they will give you a much narrower range but much more specific and relevant to what you're actually doing so I'd recommend combining these two and of course apart from these two types of databases you should go to your universities search engine Library search engine sorry because the the library will have almost everything right so you know you can just use one database and get almost everything done as well now once you've found a lot of papers it's also really good to say have some clear inclusion and exclusion criteria I think that's where a lot of people go wrong as well you know and these inclusion and exclusion criteria are necessary if you're doing a systematic review or a meta-analysis and I have another video here specifically about a systematic review but um they're really good for just doing a general literature review because you can't read everything and it would be pointless even to attempt to read everything right so to give you a couple of ideas for like some just basic inclusion and exclusion criteria is you know for example date range right so depending on your purpose of the literature review you want to limit the range of dates that you're searching for right for example especially if you're interested in finding the current research Gap to identify the research topic and then you just want to be looking at the last maybe five years or something like this at the really most recent papers you know if you're doing a more General literature review you know you can look at the last 10 years but you know there's no point in looking at the last like 30 or 40 years it's just way too much you know and as you're reading the newest papers you know in their references you will find references to some older papers which are key and which you also need to refer to right so you'll be able to find them like that but I think you want to limit it by date you know another like very easy strategy to limit the results is to kind of the side whether you know you're going to exclude conference papers maybe you're going to exclude papers from a specific um region of the world because maybe your study is just based in Europe and you're not interested in papers from Asia or vice versa right or maybe even a specific country should be the inclusion criteria so these are some like you know basic ideas but you definitely want to limit the search using those criteria right and this brings me to you know another strategy for finding the the literature which is often referred to as snowballing right so think about you know how you know and even an avalanche starts right you start with like a small bowl of snow and then it starts rolling and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger that's why we talk about the Snowball Effect right and it's a really good analogy to think about because what you can do is like if you find you know follow the steps that I've just outlined and then limit your search to the last five years or even to the last three years right what you're gonna find let's say is like 20 articles right or 15 articles that's not a lot of research papers to read but through the snow snowballing the way it works is that you can look at the references right and as you're reading the paper you know you can highlight okay I probably this is a good reference for me this is a good reference this is a good reference and these most recent papers you know will start snowballing your reference list because you can find more papers and read them and also in the reference list of those new papers find more papers and then your snowball keeps on growing and growing and growing and a good thing about it is that it's growing in the right direction because you're reading you know you're starting with a small pool of hyper relevant papers and you know from them you'd arrive you know also very hyper relevant papers to what you're doing so it can be a very very effective strategy just remember that it's not like either or that you either do at search in the database or you do this snowball technique most of the time his end you do the search and then you snowball your references right so this kind of concludes how to find your papers but you know before we get to the next step which is reading your papers what you've got to do as well is like keep track of everything I I find that you know a lot of PhD students and researchers get lost and it's very easy to get lost I've got lost as well in in all the literature so you need to have a method for keeping track of things you know and I use you know a very simple word table like this one you could also use an Excel sheet like this one where you just you know keep track of like for example the number of hits that you that you got when you search the databases which databases you searched you know the also the number the the keywords that you used right and you want to keep track of all of it because you know if you don't then if there is a problem you don't know what the problem is right where you went wrong in your literature review and that's usually what happens like when you know you're kind of halfway through the literature review and you realize that like I don't know you're missing some important information or you went completely in the wrong way like it's very difficult to figure out how to go back on the right track if you don't have this map and you're not keeping track of it right but make it simple like you know like an Excel sheet like this will do now if we move on to the second step which is reading your papers I think the most important thing and if you can just remember one thing from this video is to think about you know why am I actually reading this paper like what is my purpose here because I think you know a lot of us go wrong when we just kind of read because we think we have to read and then we end up reading you know the whole paper from start to finish you know and we do that with every single paper and that's why it's taking you a very long time to read the literature because you know you're reading everything from scratch to finish without any clear Direction in your head right so come back to that analogy that we had of the very beginning of the inverted pyramid right with the pyramid Apex here and the purpose of the literature review so the purpose of the literature review is to get us to the research Gap most of the time right there might be different purposes in each subsection of your literature review but overall we're trying to get to the research Gap right so keep that in mind as well when you're reading those papers right why are you reading them you know and there might be other reasons like for example you might be reading a paper because you're looking for a specific piece of information right you've been writing the literature review and the only thing you know it's missing in this paragraph is a specific result right or a specific argument to back up what you're saying well then please don't read the whole paper from start to finish just find one paper that has this information that you're looking for and go to the results section of the paper and find that information that will be much faster you know and much more effective as well so keep that you know kind of ask yourself always why am I reading what am I trying to achieve here and this will allow you to read much faster also the second thing that I would say here is that never read the paper from start to finish like Nobody Does it you know I've never met a single researcher who would read you know the papers for the literature review all of them from start to finish and every single word Nobody Does it because nobody has the time to do it and it's not relevant at all it doesn't fit our purpose right so what you want to be reading the parts of the paper are the ones that you know kind of answer your question why why you are reading for example if you're looking for a specific data points then of course you want to jump into the result if you're making some specific points about the methodologies that previous papers use because maybe I don't know you want to be critical and you want to criticize and point out some of the limitations of the methodologies used by previous researchers then obviously read the methodology part and maybe not even the whole thing but you're more interested in the participants specifically right or the countries where the studies were conducted so just read that and forget about everything else there's no point in reading the whole paper at that stage if that's your purpose right so that's that's the second thing that that you want to be doing and I think the next thing that is really going to help you as well is to you know clearly divide the time between reading and between writing what I found you know is that your writing is slow or and your reading is slow because you're writing and reading at the same time so what I've seen a lot of PhD students and researchers do is that you know you will you will just write something write in the literature review and then you're missing an important piece of information so you stop writing and then you start searching for it right and then you get lost in that search because you find one article you start reading it a half an hour passes and then you find another article another 20 minutes pass and then you don't even know what you are looking for and then when you come back to the text you can't even remember what you were writing it's not true and then you're stuck and you have to start from scratch you know you've broken your writing flow and writing flow is something precious and something really difficult to get so don't break your writing flow you know and when you look at the best tips for productivity the number one best tip is just to focus on one thing and do one thing forget about multitasking multitasking is you know is a lot of nonsense it doesn't work you know so what you want to do if you want to Be an Effective academic writer and if you want to do an excellent literature review is to divide the time right so this will depend on how much time you have whether you're a full-time researcher and you have to teach and to go into the lab and or whether you have another full-time job or whatever else is going on right you have to divide that time yourself right but I would put it into a Google Calendar like this for example right and what I would do is let's say you know on a Monday morning you're going to spend three hours reading right and taking notes and then on the in the afternoon you're going to spend time writing you know converting those notes into writing and then you know maybe on Tuesday again in the morning you're going to read and in the afternoon you're going to write or the other way around whatever whatever works for you right and you could you know if you have if you're doing this full time and you don't have anything else going on well then you know read in the morning for two three hours and then right in the afternoon for two three hours right if you have less time because you've got lab work and stuff like this other stuff well then you know spend two days reading in the morning and two days writing in the afternoon right but the point is it's got to be a separate activity right and you will see how much faster you can read and how much faster you can write as well and when you're writing and for example you can't find the right information something is missing don't go searching for it right now don't break that writing flow it's precious just make a note for yourself highlighted in the text or put a comment for yourself that you've got to find it later that missing piece of information and then when you start reading the next day or the same day in the afternoon well then you can find that information and add it later now as you're reading the Articles you obviously want to be taking notes as well and I think you know a lot of us just over complicated so you know if you Google how to take notes when doing the literature review you'll get like a million different programs and like you know a million different complicated things but taking notes shouldn't be complicated it should be kept as simple as possible because remember like you know the purpose of taking notes is just to distill the most important information from that article and more importantly the information that you're actually looking for not all most important information from the article the most important information you're looking for that will serve your literature review right again answering the question why in going to that pyramid Apex right so you know I use a very simple um word table like this one you know where I just have like the aim of the study and the authors of course on the title copy and paste that copy and paste the aim and because that might come in handy later and then usually you know I will take a couple of bullet points on the methodology but just very quickly and then you know the most important thing is usually the results so I'll write down like one or two key results or the the key contribution of this paper because that's usually what you're going to be putting in the literature review and we're going to be talking about that in a second right and then I also might add some you know some of my own thoughts on on this and that's it like keeping it super simple and also in one place you don't need any fancy programs you know or anything like a Word document or an Excel sheet is perfect like as long as it's searchable and as long as everything is in one place you don't need fancy stuff like that fancy stuff is usually a distraction from actually doing the work and often it is more harm than good because we focus on like the next new best program for taking notes or reading the literature or whatever it is rather than focusing on actually doing the work and reading the literature and taking notes and writing the literature right so keep it simple it can be you know something like this for example now let's move in to the third step and the third step is structuring and organizing your literature review so this is perhaps one of the most daunting steps for a lot of you because you know you've you've read it and you've got all these notes right and all these papers um saved on your computer but how do you actually structure them into a meaningful literature review right what do you do with all of that so the first thing again to keep in mind when you're structuring the literature review is you know the pyramid Apex so whenever you're writing the literature review be it you know you're writing one paragraph or you're writing the whole section or a sub section of your literature review you know you've got to be asking yourself so what why why am I writing this well what is my purpose here what am I trying to tell the reader right because remember that in the literature review you want to be leading the reader somewhere right and usually when you want to lead them at the end is the is the gap in research right so when structuring your literature review keep that in mind all the time and like when you've written a paragraph or you've written a subsection just ask yourself like so what well what is this all what what does all of this mean what is the purpose of this well what am I actually trying to tell the reader right because without this like your structure will be a complete mess and it won't make any sense whatsoever right so keep that question why in mind now there are several main ways in which you can organize your literature review and this applies to you know like a whole section or a sub section um of the literature review you know whether you're writing a whole chapter or whether you're writing a research paper that doesn't matter now the first way um and perhaps the least common one is to organize things you know based on different fields or different approaches to a problem right so let's say you're looking at you know um the the benefits of online learning right for PhD students who are writing a thesis now you could look at this problem of online learning the benefits of online learning from different perspectives right you could take the educational perspective and present research from the the field of Education you could also present you know research from the field of psychology maybe something has been done right um and you wanna you wanna look at different fields right there might be something in anthropology I don't know right but the point is that you're you're presenting findings from different fields on the same topic right if that if that makes sense and that's really useful if you have a topic where different perspectives from different fields come in now the second way in which you can structure your literature review is chronologically what that means is that you go from you know the oldest to the newest and this is useful if you want to present the development of something right so maybe you're looking at you know a particular teaching method or you're looking at a particular concept right and you want to show us how this teaching method or how this concept or this medical intervention has evolved over the years right you want to show this Evolution this development then you want to be organizing things chronologically and this can be in one paragraph or or a whole section of your literature review could be organized chronologically now when you're doing that just please keep in mind that there's got to be a point of it right in other words why why do you want to show the development what are you trying to tell us by showing us the development of this concept right keep that in mind but that's the second way in which you can organize the literature review now um the Third Way and perhaps the most common way is to just do it from General to specific right so if we keep that pyramid in mind right we've got a normal pyramid and then we turn it around right and our main point the pyramid Apex is at the very bottom and we go from General to specific just like that right and this is by far the most common way of organizing things right so if we come back to one of the topics that I've mentioned which is you know for example um how can online courses help PhD students improve their thesis right well you wanna you wanna go from General to specific in here right so you might want to talk about like what are online courses in general what are the different types of online courses and then you might want to zoom in later more specifically on one type of course specifically for PhD students right or specifically for you know postgraduate students and then you zoom in further on PhD students and then we zoom in further on writing a dissertation right because there can be online courses for PhD students to help them with productivity but not with writing the dissertation so then you want to zoom in on writing the dissertation do you see what I mean right you go from General to specific right and this is where a lot of people go wrong you know and this works as well if you're writing a paragraph always go from General to more specific this is how you structure things so now when you have like all these topics right from your literature um or in your notes organize your task is to basically prepare a literature review skeleton and the first thing that you want to outline are the main sections right usually whether you're writing a chapter or a paper this doesn't matter but usually there's like you know three four main points that you want to make right outline these three or four main points and these points are always related to your research question right so again if we're talking about online learning for PhD students to help them write PhD dissertations then you know the topics are self-explanatory you want to talk about online learning you want to talk about PhD students and the problems that they have and you want to be talking about dissertations right PhD dissertations and how online learning can improve PhD dissertations right and so always the topics are related to your research question right and then try to then think once you've got these main topics what's the most illogical order for these topics right usually it's going to be from General to specific now take one of these topics and list all the subtopics that need to be discussed there right um so you know if you've got online learning then it could be you know the importance of online learning the types of online learning the courses available you know the strengths the limitations you know of those courses the different disciplines that are applied in those kind of things right and you want to list those sub-topics and then again once you've got those subtopics what you want to think about is like well what is The Logical order for those subtopics you know should it be chronological maybe in this case it could work right because I could show the development of online learning over the last like 10 years right leading to the point now when we're going to apply it to helping HD students write thesis right if that makes sense right so again you make a bullet point right and then try to organize them in a logical order either chronological by discipline or general to specific right and then once you've got them well then take one of those topics and write a paragraph about it you know and the main idea will be the first sentence of the paragraph and then you dive deeper you go from this General to more specific sometimes you might need another paragraph on this very same little topic sometimes one will suffice if you need another one well then transition to the next paragraph about the same topic and then move on to the next subtopic and so on right that's how you structure it but I think where a lot of you know PhD students and researchers go wrong is that you try to kind of just write you know and often the advice that people get is just like yeah just right I mean the literature review will write itself just read and write you know things will become clear along the way they won't usually it will they will just become more chaotic and Messier so the first thing really that you want to do is have this outline you know as I described don't worry this outline can change it can evolve as you're reading more as you're writing that's natural but you've got to have a map right where you're actually going because without this map you're going to be going into all sorts of directions and nothing is going to make sense after a week of writing this literature review it will just be like in all sorts of different directions right so have a plan like that to structure the literature review now once we have the structure the last part is actually writing the literature review right if you've done all the previous steps correctly then this shouldn't be difficult but there are still some really key points here that you can get wrong and I want to show you how to get right so your literature review is really really good now the first thing to keep in mind is again why why are you writing this paragraph why are you writing this subsection you know so what what are you trying to tell the reader you know I honestly like whenever I read my clients papers I just always ask myself like so what what are you trying to tell me here you know and when I write my own papers I also ask myself like so what what are you trying to tell the reader here Marek and it's a very good habit to get into because it will help you to avoid being descriptive and one of the biggest problems with the literature review that a lot of you will have is being descriptive by that I mean that just people just waffle they just describe stuff so they will like spend a whole paragraph discussing one study the topic of that study the methodology of that study you know all the results of that study and so on but but this is just pointless you know you're wasting the reader's time you know you've got to keep in mind where you're going and just focus on the key points right never describe a study in so much detail just that's just too descriptive and sometimes like people are even able to synthesize information from different sources and they'll have like you know um a couple of references from different studies in one paragraph and the paragraph is seemingly nice is nicely structured but really what it's missing is like that so what you know so usually like at the end of the paragraph you know you want to reiterate to the reader like what the main message is like well where are you going with it tell the reader the reader can't guess your your mind you know and otherwise if you don't tell the reader then it will just end up being a description of different studies and just a list of studies but that's not the point right now another thing that you need to do when you're writing it is to um prepare a critical argument right so other than being descriptive you need to be critical now what does that mean well that can mean several things number one is answering the so what question you know if you always answer the so what question ever in every section then your literature review will be critical because it won't be descriptive you will be leading the reader somewhere right being critical can also mean you know criticizing previous studies and pointing out the limitations some of the problems with those previous studies and so on that's also being critical and you should do that you know being critical also means showing any disagreements in the literature right so for example maybe you want to provide a definition of a particular concept right and there are different definitions in the literature you know different and Scholars disagree with each other so you know you could present the first one the second one the third one in a paragraph but then at the end of that paragraph you want to tell us like yeah what what do these different definitions mean and what is the definition I'm going to use in this literature review right that's being critical if you just present different definitions you're just being descriptive because we don't know what's your point when you're presenting all these different definitions right so also remember to um you know to to be critical like that now another common mistake that I think you know some of you might be making when writing the literature review is that you you know there are no links between ideas there is no coherent story and when you hear that you know complaint from a supervisor from a reviewer coherent story basically what they mean is that your ideas aren't connected and they don't flow into each other and I found that you know one of the biggest reasons for that is that you don't make those connections clear to the reader you assume that the reader knows and they can read your mind but the reader cannot read your mind you've got to tell them what's your point right so again coming back to this so what question but you've got to also tell them how this sentence is connected to the previous sentence right so you want to be using you know for example linking words such as however moreover therefore to connect these ideas right to tell the reader what's going on you want to be using you know determinants like this problem problem you know this problem that I've just discussed this problem these ideas that I've just discussed right or another effect you know I've discussed one effect and now I'm discussing another effect right if you do that there will be a much more coherent flow in your literature review right and things will be better linked now connected to that to that lack of coherent flow is that you know I've noticed that a lot of PhD students and researchers are starting every sentence with the name of the author right so they say you know Gonzalez found X Y and Z and then they say You observe that blah blah and then they say um also noted that and the whole paragraph is written like that now it's good that you're referencing things but the problem with that is that there are no connections between ideas it's just a list of findings from different studies but we don't know how they're connected and it's very difficult to connect them if every sentence starts with the name of the author because you would always have to say like moreover however therefore right which would become very repetitive as well so I think what you want to do is like you know if you started one sentence you know that's saying for example that teach Kovac found that online courses can help PhD students write a better thesis right then you know you wanna you wanna start the next sentence with an idea that links to the preceding sentence right so the improvements in the PHD thesis where blah blah blah right so I've just mentioned that it can help improve PhD thesis and now I'm saying the improvements right so that helps me to draw a connection if I just started this sentence with the name of the author there would be no connection if you found this video helpful but you want more personalized help and attention helping you to write an excellent PhD thesis or research papers for top journals in the field then schedule a free one-to-one consultation and the link is right below this video and this will be a one-to-one chat on Zoom or Google meets or something like that where we're going to dive deeper into the challenges that you're currently facing and what you want to achieve and then we'll outline a personalized strategy to help you to achieve those goals faster so if you want to do that then book that free one-to-one consultation and the link is right below this video

Channel: Academic English Now

Views: 31,876

Keywords: academic writing, how to write a thesis, how to write a research paper, academic English, writing a PhD, qualitative research, research gap, literature review, research paper, quantitative research, systematic review, review paper, research proposal, how to write an essay, writing tips, essay structure, research methodology, research methods, phd writing, grad school, dissertation, writers block, post-graduate, post doctoral, how to, thesis

Id: FwjgHgkZyN8

Length: 38min 43sec (2323 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023