At the Woodhill Park Research Retreat, we seem to have encountered a steady trickle of people who appear to be having problems getting on top of their thesis literature review.  The problem is that there's so much literature and so little time - and besides, what messages in your literature review do you really need to convey to your examiner and why?  And just how do you go about doing all of this? 

Is it simply a matter of obtaining lots of material from of a range of libraries and electronic data-bases, and reading them for months on end whilst taking copious notes?  When do you actually begin to write your literature review and how long should it be?  How will you know that it's complete and that it's up to scratch? 

There is, as we're sure you already know, an abundance of material about literature reviews which we're not going to traverse here.  After all, it's over to you to do that because discerning and distinguishing between the useful and the not-so-useful is a part of becoming critical.  Indeed, becoming selective as well as critically analytical is fundamental to critiquing reviewed literature. 

On the assumption that you've already selected your topic, and come to grips with the context of that topic domain, you really need to sniff out (probably with the help of a subject librarian) potentially useful information enclaves.  A few of these will be mighty useful but invariably, many, many others will be depressingly unrelated to your topic.  Mischievously, a number of tributaries of literature are bound to serve as springboards to distraction because it's very tempting to meander through stacks of interesting albeit unrelated data.  Truly, you're better off trying to stick to the point!  

Whatever sources of information you use, and there will be many, the mountain of discursive material you gather will present you with twin data management challenges.  These involve getting the information in the first place, and thereafter, organising it in both a meaningful and easily retrievable manner.  Thereafter, as we mention below, there's a wee task left to complete which has to do with actually writing up your critical literature review - but that's another matter to be traversed at another time. 

Seriously, in order to make your searches meaningful, work out your key words because these will inform your searches.  This will almost certainly mean you'll have to invoke Boolean operators and if you don't know about these, you need to learn about them and how they can be applied. 

Certainly, whether or not you know about Boolean logic, you should work carefully at getting help from a subject librarian.  Realistically, you'll get the best results possible if you approach your subject librarian with all the humility you can muster.  A helpful subject librarian, or a librarian who is expert at invoking searches, can help you to discover, round up, lasso and corral useful literature in ways that would probably take you days, if not weeks, of precious time. 

Crucially, having a sound grasp of how to use EndNote is remarkably handy at this point[1].  If you don't know how to use this really valuable software then learn how to use it – do it now – don’t leave it to later!

Then, when you have gathered your first wave of literature material, you need to devise ways of effectively managing your ever-accumulating resources.  You need to manage them so that you can add to them, retrieve them, or even selectively cull them.  You need to be able to do this at will.  As you write and tweak and re-tweak your literature review (a process that ought to happen in tandem with each chapter you assemble) you will need to be able to access your data.  Ready retrieval is a must for you to be able to initially craft, and subsequently revise and re-configure your work so that the final story strongly conveys your intended messages to your examiners.   

A key challenge here, aside from mastering EndNote, is to make sure that your filing systems are effective.  What folders do you have within your computer and what further folders within them have you created?  Why have you done this and did you work the filing system out beforehand or did it grow like topsy in an unfettered manner?  Time taken now to create well disciplined filing structures for your materials and the notes you generate will almost certainly save time and prevent frustration later.

Eventually the time will come when your supervisor, or your family, will say, “enough reading – construct your review!  Get on with it.  Stop procrastinating…”  So what will you write about, and how will you proceed?  These are not matters that we will address here but they are issues that we’ve touched on within the slide show and accompanying notes that you can access by clicking here.  We suggest that you bookmark this site and visit it regularly because there will be more resources added at regular intervals.  Oh, and do provide us with feedback or blog your thoughts.  We’d enjoy a critical discussion or three…