Hello

I'm currently trying (emphasis on trying) to do my literature review and I feel like i'm getting nowhere! Its taking over everything else, i.e lab work, presentations etc, and is the only thing I think about. When I have days when i'm working on other things i'm really happy but as soon as I get back to the lit review I get really down. I've read lots of books/articles to help and understand what the lit review is but just can't seem to get anywhere with it, it doesn't help that not much has been written in my subject area compared to other theses in my department which i've read.

Sorry to bring this up again, i'm sure lots of people have complained about the lit review before, but any help would be much appreciated!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank

My approach to the lit review has been to write it like you are just trying to understand the primary goals of your research. Start off by defining the key concepts and ideas (I mean the big and extremely obvious ones), by define I mean just get a book that offers the most basic overview of the concept or theory and once you start writing you will find that it becomes more and more specific on its own. I know it is hard to start but just keep in your mind that you just want to get your ideas down and you can fix it up later. The opening line can read like this: "One aspect that is of particular importance to this study is achieving conceptual precision in regards to the analytical characteristics of....................

Thanks very much for that, I think i'm struggling with excepting that it can't be perfect at this stage (i'm 6 months in) and will keep evolving so your advice was really helpful.:-)

Try to keep good notes of anything relevant you read. Write half a page for each article and try to group them into categories. It will make things easier in the future, don't end up like me; " Where did I find this information?" and spend so much time sorting out references, forget half of what I have read etc.

I just started to write a "what do I know about this topic/who said what and why is that good or bad" lit review. When I handed it in (it was the 1st proper piece I'd written), my sup said it was ok. I am now in the "let's revise the whole thesis and see if things that I wrote more than a year ago still make sense" stage and obviously need to review my lit review (pun not intended). And it actually doesn't seem too bad.

I hated to write it too, but just got it over and done with and it makes revising it a lot easier, just because there's something on paper (even if it is not quite what it's supposed to be:$ )
So all I can say is: just start writing something about what you're reading, what is the topic, how does it fit (or not) with your research, etc. Once you have that down on paper it's much easier to revise and restructure things, methinks.

Good luck!

Read Hart 'Doing a literature review' :-) Thats the second time I've put this on this site today :$ but I have found it sooo useful. It put a completely different slant on the way to approach it, and certainly clarified what was supposed to be there for me.