Hi everyone/anyone

I'm currently reading loads of articles to try and write my lit review, just wondering if you have any tips of the best way to do this. Athos78 (might have got the name slightly wrong) put up some really useful tips for completing a PhD, and suggested writing a brief summary of every article you read for the lit review. How did anyone else manage the lit review, did you write detailed reports on every article, brief notes, do the lit review as you went along, read everything first. I'm just not sure how I should be approaching the lit review and how to organise myself and would really appreciate advice from those that have been there and done it. Big thanks :-x

======= Date Modified 22 May 2009 15:26:26 =======
hi Java. the way i did it personally. i did a spider diagram of the main topics i wanted to cover. then did a pubmed search for the latest review articles on the subjects, and read the review articles throughly making notes and highlighting refereces they cited and got those for further details.

i personally, like to read an article and alongside make notes, i cant just read an article, i find it too passive - i have to actively being doing something. it takes longer, but helps to stick some of the ideas into my head.

also sometimes you will read the article once, and have no clue what it says, but when you read another article on the same subject, might help to get used to the subject and then when you come back to the first article a second time, its more familiar and might pick up on some things you missed before.

also during a reading of an article, you might come across some terms and defintions that are used frequently that you are not familiar with, in those cases, i do a quick search on google to get a very basic encyclopedia defintion of the term. that helps aswell.

I tried two ways.
1) I read the papers, then made notes straight into word document. Later on I re-arranged notes/summaries into section and then revised the structure and text. This only works for small lit reviews, as if you have too many pages, working like that in a work document it becomes tedious and I dont really recommend doing it this way.
2) This is the better way, I found. Read the papers, make hand-written notes or summaries. Then after a good chunk of reading (I feel I have a good grasp of the topic now) I re-read my own notes, put the thinking cap on and build an outline/structure to the review. Then create subsections and with the help of the notes, write each section bit by bit. In each section, I make sure I have all the correct citations and arguments, so sometimes I needed to go back to some papers to clarify. For me, the lit review is kind of an iterative process.

I think the way an approach will work for you will also depend on how much you know already about the bigger picture of the topic. You might already have an idea of what your lit review will contain, and so, reading will be more focussed. I suppose most of the time though, there is a certain amount of reading around, and not all will end up in your lit review.

I did my literature review this year so the pain is still quite acute ;-) I read and read and read, following references from each article and book to spread the net as wide as possible and made handwritten notes on each, some are pretty bare (I'm a margin of the book/article type note taker), some are covered and highlighted etc etc, some were obviously irrelevent so weren't disgarded as such, but placed into a file of 'interesting articles - but not directly relevent at the time'. I think my method of writing it all up may be more aimed towards the humanities disciplines but in the field that I am researching there are two quite distinct camps and some academics semi floating between the two, so from there is was relatively easy to define the areas of concern and place the articles into almost for and against camps and from there it was simply a question of writing up the findings, the stances taken, the arguments as they stand and their development over time etc etc.

I am not organised enough (to my shame) to write summaries of each and every article/book I read - I do try, but I more make a note on the front of the main thrust of the argument so I can see at a glance which side of the fence they fall in and then highlight, margin note etc throughout the body of it as I'm reading. The main ones I'll then read again a few times over the write up process as so often you miss little points on the initial read through. I too find it hard to simply 'read' - I find my mind wondering and prefer to be colouring in ;-) and to be honest, by the time you've read dozens of the darned things you can't remember who said what and where and waste so much time reading back through trying to find what you thought you'd seen so I would recommend taking out shares in highlighter manufacturers.

I do think though, and this is something that my supervisor pointed out, that you have to work the way that you work. Some are much more for writing notes into a word or similar document as they go, some prefer the piles of handwritten notes, some prefer the colouring in and margins, and most end up doing a mixture, but the most important thing when preparing this is that whatever system you use you ensure that you have enough pointers to know what is where - for me my scribbles on the front of the articles or post-it notes on book covers is enough in most cases, sometimes I make something more detailed. For others its writing that summary and filing it, but just make sure that you don't waste time having to find it again. U/G and MA essays are bad enough with the books, but during the course of a Phd you will have read so very many pieces that you can't hope to remember where you read what :-)

Thank you for your responses, they are very useful and is interesting to see the different methods, this has given me confidence to see what works best for me, thanks (up)

i am also in the middle of a literature review. and your replies are very helpful. i like making notes and separating my articles according to themes i identify. but i always thought i waste alot of time with my system and there must be more efficient ways of doing the review.

I'm one of those read an article and make an outline of it then go through that outline to compose a short report. I'll do this with several articles then in the end I will combine them all into one usable piece.