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Completing A Literature Review

Tips for conducting a literature review

  • Develop a keyword search strategy.  This will facilitate a fast, effective and thorough search of your selected resources. It will also help you to focus your search and increase the relevance of the material that you retrieve.
  • Decide on the scope and range of your review. This will be influenced by the purpose and size of your review i.e. whether it is a standalone assignment or part of a research project. 
  • Outline some initial parameters for the search.
    • What time period does your review cover, previous 12 months, 5 or 10 years?
    • Will you: 
      • include or exclude material from different geographic zones?
      • limit your search to English language material only?
      • limit the type of research that you include?  For example only include qualitative or quantitative studies?
      • limit the type of literature and resources you use?
  • Identify any specialist material that you might need, such as government statistics, standards or guidelines.  Think about where you can search for and access this material.
  • Select a variety of credible and suitable information sources.  Remember to include specialist subject sources.
  • Conduct a comprehensive search of the relevant sources. Ensure you include the main databases within your subject area. Use a variety of sources to ensure you conduct a comprehensive review of the relevant material
  • Evaluate your search strategy.  Are the results of your searches relevant? If not, you may need to check that your keywords are correct and that you are looking in the right sources for your subject.
  • Evaluate the material you have gathered. Be sure to check the quality, accuracy, credibility and currency of the information. When you take information from a non-academic source (for example, search engines), you also need to identify the purpose of the information.  This is because if the information was originally published to sell products or ideas, the information may be biased. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t include this information in your research, but it does mean that you need to inform your readers of any flaws or potential bias.
  • Be aware of your own confirmation bias.  Don’t include material just because it agrees with your point of view.  Evaluate information thoroughly.  Remember your literature review needs to be critical so don’t exclude relevant information because it disagrees with your point of view, it is important to acknowledge other contradictory research.
  • Read and evaluate the literature you have gathered. ​Take and make notes; summarising and annotating as you read.  Store your notes electronically, in a spreadsheet or in a written format.  You could use a structured note taking method such as the Cornell Method.
  • Develop a current awareness strategy.  For longer term projects, for example at postgraduate level, it will be important to keep up to date with the latest research within your area, e.g. Google Alerts or alerts on the relevant subject databases.
  • Use reference management software to keep a record of your sources. Our library supports RefWorks.
  • Plan and write your review.

If you are conducting a literature review as part of a research project, you should consider keeping a research diary.  It could contain:

  • A written record of your search strategy
  • Details of the information resources you searched and the date that you searched them (this could help you to avoid duplicating searches)
  • A list of research related activities, such as a project timeline and a task list (outlining significant dates and deadlines)
  • Questions for your supervisor
  • Inspiration (eureka moments!)

A research diary can serve as the basis for any progress reports or presentations that need to be done during the research project. It can also provide a place to record any issues or thoughts that your may have during the research process, which can be useful if you are required submit a reflective piece of writing as part of your research project.

Depending on how extensive your review is you may have a large amount of information to find, evaluate and use.  So it will be important to be organised from the beginning of your research. There are different methods for doing this.  

Visual Aids

  • A spider (dia)gram is visual aid that can help to explore and map a subject.   It can illustrate how topics are connected to each other and identify keywords. It can also allow you to map the literature you find onto your keywords, which will help to identify gaps in the literature.  For a brief overview of how to get started have a look at this short video.
  • Mind maps can be used for taking notes, brainstorming ideas and organizing your information. Similar to Spider grams, they are also good for organizing knowledge, showing relationships, developing keywords and mapping literature to your keywords. For details of how to draw a mind map have a look at this short video.
  • Concepts maps are hierarchical diagrams that can help you to understand and organise knowledge.  They can be particularly useful when dealing with large amounts of information.  Like mind maps and spider grams, they also help to identify and explore relationships between topics. Concept maps are good for planning and designing literature reviews. For a brief explanation of how to make a concept map have a look at this short video.

Text-based Methods 

A spreadsheet can be useful for research because you sort can and organise your information.  You can create tables, add notes, definitions and citation information.

And don't forget RefWorks!

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0