Literature Review
Literature Review At A Glance
The literature review is usually the most time-consuming, but most-overlooked aspect of the dissertation process. The good news is that writing a literature review is a direct extension of the topic development process. The main difference is that for topic development you are limiting your search search to to scholarly articles published within the last 1-3 years. When writing the full literature review, most universities require that around 80% of the articles cited be published within the last five years and the remaining 20% is allotted for older seminal or historical studies.
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Another difference between topic development literature research and full literature research is that the former focuses on the discussion section of articles (to help identify recommendations for future research) and latter focuses on articles as a whole.
The most common challenge doctoral candidates face when writing a literature review is not being able to synthesize the corpus of relevant literature and draft a narrative that supports your research gap. A literature review should not read like a series of annotated bibliographies. When engaging with past research in your field, you have to be able to make connections between studies and identify themes and trends that may not be explicitly stated. The outcome for the actual literature review chapter should be a clearly structured narrative that discusses the corpus of literature thematically all while 'funnelling' down to your specific research gap. ​
How will Dissertation Demystified help me?
Dissertation Demystified's literature review module coaches you on developing key skills and habits for engaging with a large number of academic articles:
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First, we teach you the structure of peer-reviewed articles so you know exactly where to find the information you need without reading the article word-for-word, thus streamlining the process.
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Second, we coach you in developing good habits relating to creating literature spreadsheets to keep track of the key information you need cite from each article as well as best practices for properly formatting references and keeping track of them in a reference software such as Zotero.
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In breaking down each article into digestible pieces in an spreadsheet, it allows you to work with a much more manageable set of data and gives you the space to synthesize and paraphase the important information from each article in your own words. Click here for an example of our literature review spreadsheet.