Hi all!

I am currently rewriting my literature review which has grown out of control over the past couple of years with me adding messy notes now and again. Regretting it now as it pretty much needs to be rewritten and massively reduced down! I am in humanities (human geography) and wondered how long people aim for their lit review to be? The thesis should be around 80,000 words in terms of the department regulations.

Thanks :)

Sarah

I am in my first year (8 months in) and my supervisors have just asked me to produce a draft of my literature review, they asked for it to be between 6-8000 words. I am in the social sciences so like yours, my thesis will be around the 80,000 word mark. Do you have any literature-review writing tips for me at my early stage?

Nx

Hi Sarahlouise,

Not sure if this helps but mine is only about 35,000 and my lit review is 5,000.

@Natassia, not sure if this helps, these are some of the things that I learned from my mistakes:
1) Make good use of titles, subtitles, etc
2) Keep track of your references as you go along
3) Always keep in mind what you're trying to tell the reader (that helps to extract unnecessary info and keep you focussed on the topic)

I was in the humanities (history). My literature review was about 6500 words long. That included a brief description of my methodology, and key questions. It was sort of a combined introduction chapter. My entire finished thesis was about 70,000 words long.

I am not in favour of too-long literature reviews. Much that goes into them is not relevant to the student's specific topic and should have been trimmed. And it's not fair to expect examiners to wade through all the irrelevancies. Try to keep it coherent and focused.

I've been advised to keep all chapters roughly the same length. So, 80,000 words (as I laughingly remind myself!), 8 chapters, about 10,000 a chapter. My supervisor also told me, early on, that the thesis pretty much writes itself, so I'm looking forward to sitting back & watching that happen!!
Mog ;-)

oh dear, what have I done wrong Mog, 'coz mine most certainly didn't :-(

Suddenly there came the crushing realisation that I had been duped!!

Dunleavy in his "Authoring a PhD" (or some such title) book recommends that chapters around about 10,000 are good to aim for. Much longer and they're unbalanced and too much for examiners too wade through. Much shorter and they are likely to be lacking content.

My thesis was 70,000 words long and in 7 chapters. My chapters averaged at about 10,000 words, but they varied quite widely in lengths. Some were quite a lot shorter, some quite a lot longer. Basically they were as long as they needed to be. But I still found 10,000 a nice length. Just don't try to make every chapter that length!

Hey! My thesis was 9 chapters and about 85,000 words (clinical psychology). I also found that my literature review was far too long, and in the end I broke it down into two chapters, as most of it did need to be included. Obviously the length will depend to some extent on how much literature there is to review! I ended up with a 'methods and evidence' chapter (which reviewed the methods that had previously been used to examine the topic, and the evidence that had emerged from these studies) and a theoretical framework chapter (examined the different theoretical perspectives previously used to examine the topic and explained my choice of framework), although that probably isn't a relevant format for what you're studying. If there really is a lot of stuff that does need to be included, you can just break it down into more than one chapter (but make sure you've cut out everything you realistically can cut out, and make sure you aren't repeating yourself). Best, KB

Thank you for the replies. I am starting to worry as my lit review is currently MASSIVE and everyday I seem to find something new that needs adding :(

Splitting it into two chapters may be a good strategy as there just seems to be so much relevant stuff. There is the conceptual framework literature and then the research which has looked at the same topic as me.

Thanks again :)

My supervisor is expecting a 20-30K word Literature review! I am just at the end of year one and have probably got only about 5000 words towards the review. I am finding it so very difficult and it's stressing me out waaay to much.

Is the literature review meant to be quite this stressful? Its putting me off continuing with my EngD and making me doubt myself rather a lot.