Hey, guys welcome to Grad Coach TV where we demystify and simplify the oftentimes confusing
world of academic research. My name is David and today I am chatting to one of our trusted
coaches Amy about five top tips to keep in mind when you are tackling your literature review.
This discussion is based on one of our many articles on the Grad Coach blog. So if you
would like to find out more about the literature review chapter head over to gradcoach.com/blog.
Also if you are looking for a helping hand with your dissertation, thesis, or research project
be sure to check out our one-on-one private coaching service where you can work with
one of our friendly coaches that will be with you step by step through the research
journey. For more information and to book a free consultation head over to gradcoach.com.
So Amy welcome to the Coach Cast it is really great to have you here. Hi,
David thank you. Amy we are going to jump right into it and today we are talking about five tips
for your literature review. And the first one is to develop a rough outline or framework for your
literary review before you start writing. Why is this such a good idea? I love this topic David I
love talking about literature reviews because it is like putting a puzzle together. So when you are
putting a puzzle together you do not just throw the pieces into a pile in the middle you first
look at the picture on the box. So you want to have some kind of a frame you want to identify
the important elements of the overall picture. So before you start writing you want to have some
kind of a loose structure or outline otherwise it will end up being a jumbled mess. So you might
begin with an introduction like you do with all your chapters where you provide an overall outline
for the contents and purpose of the chapter then you might identify some important jargon words,
words specialized to your field that maybe your readers will not be familiar with so they will
be able to follow along and then you get into your heart of your review. So you might organize
your topics, your headings in a few different ways. If you are looking at how a phenomenon
has changed over time or how an organization has changed over time you might organize your review
chronologically or you might organize thematically if you want to make sure to cover all of the main
topics of your study. That is probably the most common way to organize your literature review.
If you happen to be offering a unique take on your methods you might compare and contrast the
methods section of your research in your review and so you might organize it methodologically.
And then you want to make sure to talk about the gaps in the literature. So the whole point of the
literature review is you are saying here is what the literature says here is what it does not say
and this is how my study is going to address those gaps. So that is really essential that you focus
on the gaps. And then you might end with some sort of closing where you explain the logic behind how
you connected those dots the logic behind how you connect the pieces of the puzzle. That is
really helpful Amy and remember it is important to have the structure because it helps you
frame the process of your literature review but do not feel chained to it. It is going to change
it is going to develop as you are reading as you are writing so do not feel you have to
stick to it because you have set it up. But it is there to help you get started and move forward.
So our second tip is to look at previous literature reviews. Amy, what is the benefit
of taking a look at what previously people have written about your topic? Yeah, so you have this
daunting task right the literature review. You have fifty, a hundred references it is easy to get
sort of lost in this and overwhelmed. So rather than allow yourself to get overwhelmed do not
reinvent the wheel take a look at your university online library, take a look at some of the
published dissertations and thesis related somehow to your topic and then look at their literature
review how did they organize it, what topics did they cover and that will give you a good
sense of all of the norms related to your field of all the things you want to make sure that you
cover in your literature review. And then you can start to go into some of the academic journals.
You use Google Scholar so you literally type in your topic plus literature review or any sort
of public open-access database like EBSCO like ProQuest and then you want to make sure you sort
of identify what kind of a literature review it is you are looking at. Is it a traditional narrative
literature review is it an SLR? An SLR is a systematic literature review and that is kind of
a more comprehensive literature review that has a bit more detailed exclusion and inclusion criteria
or is it a quantitative meta-analysis. I think that is a really key point Amy because
each of those literature review types is going to be written in different ways
and you are not necessarily going to use those each in your own way. Another important thing to
keep in mind is be careful of how old that literature review is you are basing your
thinking on. If it is too old you are going to be running into issues that it is not up to date.
So a great thing to look at is take a look at literature probably within the last three
to five years that is sort of the ideal. And then you really want to make sure that you are checking
if there is not more recent research. So a great way to do that is to head over to Google Scholar
type in the name of that literature review and then see who cited it since it is been published
and that can be a really good way to get right up to date with what is happening currently in your
field. Yes, recent research is where you want to be three to five years perfect rule. Caveat
to that is when you are citing seminal authors when you are talking about a phenomenon that has
been well established in the research. You want to go back to the first person who created that
sort of concept particularly in your methods section if you are talking about qualitative
methodology and you are trying to defend why you chose qualitative methodology you want to make
it very clear that you are very familiar with those seminal authors which may have you know
developed that in the 1960s. So that would be one caveat to making sure that your research is three
to five years recent. That is an excellent catch we definitely want to be citing the
relevant authors' both seminal and recent work and that is really what makes for a rich literature
review is that you are covering what has been done and identifying those gaps that exist.
So our third tip that is really important is to write first and then think about editing
and cleaning things up. Amy, why do we want to just jump into the writing? So one of the
biggest mistakes I see students make is thinking everything has to be perfect right out of the
gate. The problem with that way of thinking is that it actually prevents you from making
progress. Writing is a form of thinking so when you are first starting to write your literature
review you are sort of brainstorming you are getting your ideas out and that is perfectly
okay. It should feel messy. If it feels messy you are doing it right. By the time that you are done,
you are going to have many versions of your paper and you do not know what your supervisors, your
committee are going to have to say. They might say okay you need to add this in you need to take this
out and they will do this multiple times so do not pre-edit yourself. The most important thing
is that you get out of your head and onto the page. Another point to really keep in mind is do
not feel locked into writing from A to Z. Writing is an iterative process you can move from A to C
to B to D and really the point there is we want to avoid writer's block. Because there is always
going to be a section in your literature review where things get tough. And so when you hit that
wall when you are feeling a bit unsure take a break, move to a different section of your
literature review and that is why we developed that outline that I suggested in tip one.
Yes, and you said that word iterative so you will hear this word a lot associated with the writing
process. So iterative just means there are going to be many iterations. The writing is back and
forth so you are not going to start at A and end at C. It is going to be all over the place but one
day you are going to wake up and it is going to be complete. I think that is such a key point because
perfection is the enemy of complete. I know from my own experience I spent so much time working
on my PhD on my literature review and still to this day I want to go back and make changes.
But it was accepted I got my degree so obviously, it was good enough. But in my eyes at the time
it was a mess and not perfect. So definitely feel perfectly comfortable to submit that draft and get
that feedback. Yes that is I think a pretty common feeling. I mean the thing is you are never really
going to be done. Years later you will go back and you will see that one word that one phrase that
you could have done a little bit better. But at some point, you just have to walk away and submit.
Exactly because you want that degree you do not want to be stuck doing this project forever.
So our fourth tip is to insert your citations as you write. Amy, why do we need to be doing this
as we go rather than right at the end? So your literature review should be full of citations.
You want to convey to your readers to your committee that you have done extensive research
on these topics and that you have essentially become an expert on these topics. So you will
have so many references. It is a helpful tip to embed those citations as you go either as
narrative or in-text citations. So I have seen students who will make a claim and they will leave
a parenthesis blank with the thinking that they will circle back later and insert that citation.
That is such a good point and it is something that I know I myself did
while I was doing my research. I may or may not have done that and lost references and then had
to spend more than a few days going back through all the papers to find that specific reference.
So definitely it is important to make that claim, support it with reference rather than to make the
claim without any support and then to have to go find it. Because remember with the literature
review we are presenting what previous literature has done and so it is less about your perspective
and rather what the literature says and then a synthesis of that. Right and the last thing you
want to have to do before after you have done all these hours of work and just before you
submit is to have to go back and remember where you found the research and to have to put it in
there correctly that is a real drag. So as you go make sure that you are keeping in mind the format
style that you are using. Get the spacing, the punctuation and how to write the author's name in
there so you do not have to worry about that later on. And I think Mendeley is a reference manager
you might consider using. Mendeley will actually do that for you so that might be something to
consider to help you organize all these many, I mean you might have two hundred references you
know by the time you are done so that will really help you organize all your references and have
that in one spot. So I cannot agree more Mendeley is a life changer. I think there is no excuse not
to be using a reference manager. You are cutting out a lot of stress and a lot of frustration
because the reference manager can handle formatting your references for you assuming you
put data in correctly. And it can also help with in-text citations, building up your bibliography
and some of them can even catalogue your research for you from the internet through plugins.
So it is super worthwhile going into and if you are interested in it we do have videos on both
Mendeley and Zotero. Two free programs that are great reference management software.
So our fifth and final tip is to get feedback. Ask a friend a non-expert to take a look at
your work and give you honest feedback. Amy, what is the benefit of taking this approach?
Right, so I think the benefit is at some point you stop seeing the words. You have been staring at
these words staring at these pages for so many hours I think it gets to the point where it is
difficult to even objectively read it anymore. So you grab a friend, grab an outside person
to come in and read it and they will be able to okay I was not following you here and that will
help you to know okay I need to go back to that point and expand and clarify a little bit. Yeah,
you really are going to find at some point your shoulders deep in the topic. You are not going
to be aware where you are assuming knowledge on behalf of your reader. And so getting that outside
perspective from anyone from a unrelated field is super helpful. I know in my own experience helping
students with their literature review often enough I am able to make really helpful comments and
suggestions based solely on the fact that I am not a specialist in the field. So I figure out
when there is jargon or an argument that is not well set up because I cannot follow it. And that
is a great tip that you can get from a friend or anyone else. Yeah because you are at the point
that you are so enmeshed in the topic and you really have become kind of an expert
that you assume that everyone can, is following your logic but which is not necessarily the case.
So having someone who is unattached to your work comment and read it and even have them summarize
it back to you, you will hear it. You will hear very quickly okay this is not what I meant here
or this is not clear. Specifically with words in terms which I think sometimes you are writing and
you think you have introduced it already in that chapter but you have not. So I see this
quite a bit so this is why it is helpful to have someone from the outside come in and read it and
even summarize it back to you. It is definitely worth not being shy about getting that feedback.
Feedback is only going to help you improve. And to be honest every person has a unique perspective
in life and specific experiences and so often enough they might come up with really unique
insights that you would not have come up with. They might even help you to identify a gap in the
research that you had not seen. So definitely whenever you can reach out get that feedback
it is definitely going to be helpful. Amy thanks so much for joining us it has been
really great you have been super helpful. Cannot wait to see you next time. Absolutely David.
All right so that pretty much wraps up this episode of Grad Coach TV. Remember if you are
looking for more information about the literature review chapter be sure to check out our blog
at gradcoach.com/blog. There you can also get access to our free dissertation thesis writing
mini-course which gives you all the information you need to get started on your research journey.
Also if you are looking for a helping hand with your dissertation, thesis or research project
be sure to check out our one-on-one private coaching service where you can work with one
of our friendly coaches just like Amy. For more information and to book a free consultation head
over to gradcoach.com. Alright, so that is it for today's episode. Until next time good luck.