I am studying part-time for my PhD (biomedical engineering) and I had my first meeting with my supervisor last week. It went very well but he changed my project and asked me to look at the literature in the new field with a view to finding a new novel approach!


I am preparing a literature review but I am unsure how formal I should make the review, (he seemed quite casual about it) should I include all the reference sources or would an outline of the main technologies with improvements be enough?


I am going to email my sup and ask him what he is looking for but I just wanted to get all of you thoughts before I word my email to him, I don’t want to look stupid after only two weeks.


Thanks for any advice you can give.


Kind regards


Stephen

I don't know your area, but I think in regards to a lit review, you should do it formally and academically, with proper references. You'd need to do this later anyway, so might as well start off by doing things properly. Start off broad, covering the general field, then get more specific ie main technologies and improvements. Your supervisor might be casual about this as this is really de rigeur to him, and is often the first step when starting research.

And don't worry about looking stupid!! Or rather - get used to it!;-) Lots of us feel stupid a great deal of the time - part of the PhD process.

Good luck!

It depends a bit on the time scale you have been given. For example, if it is a broad overview, with the object of finding a niche for your research and you have just a week or so, my approach would be to spend a bit of time looking at the area as a whole, to map out the main direction and identify diverging ideas within the field. Then I would identify one or two - or more of these subsections that might prove fruitful and subject them to a more detailed analysis to gain insight into the ideas and the concepts that they were working on. From this you may identify one or two paths that excite you, and to which you think you could contribute effectively. If you put this lot together in a coherent way, and add the references cited in the articles which would help you on this path, I think that would be a good start. If they want anything more detailed, they will tell you.

Incidentally, we all feel the same way about giving work into our supervisors at least some of the time. My supervisor asked me to lead some discussions out of the blue last week, and then afterwards said how much my contribution had helped him, inwardly my response was 'I'm not worthy of that kind of praise :$' whilst also thinking - he thought it was good, yippee!!!

Thanks for the replies Sue2604 and Joyce, I will definitely be submitting a formal lit review after you comments.

Thanks again

Stephen