How to plan a literature review
Written by Raymundo Machado de Azevedo
Writing a literature review is a daunting task. It takes a lot of time and, at the beginning of the journey,
it will seem impossible to finish. You will have to read many papers and it can be hard to know where
to begin. In this article, I won’t give any tips that will miraculously make the task a walk in the park.
Nevertheless, I hope to ease the overwhelming feeling common to those new to a scientific topic —
the feeling of walking through the fog in uncharted territory.
Before you read on, I want to note
that this piece is based mostly on per-
sonal experience and that is not suf-
ficient evidence that this method will
work for you. Nevertheless, I hope by
sharing my experience I might help
someone.
One of the main tips I often hear for
writing effectively – literature review
or any other piece of text for that mat-
ter – is to create an outline of the top-
ics that should be covered on a specific
subject. There should be some indica-
tion of headings and sub-headings,
each paragraph should have one clear
message that will build an argument
on each section and a good number
of references already organized to en-
dorse these messages.
How to create an outline?
I particularly like Umberto Eco’s take
on this issue. He says that outlining
is similar to planning a road trip. First,
you decide which sites will be visited
and how long you will stay at each
one of them. In addition, the road map
should contain information about the
activities that will take place at each
site. Although good advice for experi-
enced travelers, how can a newcomer
create a road map without knowing
many details about the map or places
on it? How can a student, new to a
scientific topic, know where to begin
when exploring the vast landscape of
previous research? pers I read would only set the path to
find the next papers to be read. Then
how should someone new to a scien-
tific topic start planning the literature
review? I suggest starting from semi-
nal papers and current reviews. These
should give a low-resolution perspec-
tive of the map you are trying to cre-
ate. At this stage, it is hard to clearly
see each site that you should spend
some time on, but these will increase
in resolution as you continue reading
about the subject.
After many readings and much strug-
gle, I noticed that writing a literature
review was far from linear. I once
thought it was supposed to be a
straight path from paper A to paper Z
then wrapping everything up in a nice
way. After a while it became more like
an iterative process. The first few pa- I think this is the time to ask for ad-
vice from experienced colleagues,
those who once explored the same
landscape you are trying to map. My
suggestion is to ask a senior graduate
student, postdoctoral fellow or super-
visor for an initial – although short –
reading list. I am not saying that you
But how to find seminal papers?
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