Literature Reviews: A Blog for the Exasperated from Writing Works Consulting

Mind maps promise a great deal. Organise your thoughts! Find connections! Make structure fun! And it’s true. It can be fun. We can spend many happy hours putting our ideas into colourful bubble shapes and connecting them with lines.  It feels like progress. But is it? Let’s say you’re doing a study on mindfulness practices and productivity at work. In a typical mind map, the main topic would be in a big circle at the centre, maybe ‘Mindfulness at Work’.  Radiating out from this central point towards the corners and edges of the page would be related themes, each in a smaller circle, such as productivity, stress reduction, organisational culture, focus , and criticisms . And each of these sub-themes would generate even smaller topic bubbles based on what the papers in each cluster tended to cover. Stress reduction, for example, might have bubbles representing papers on burn-out reduction, emotional regulation , and improved moods .  Circles, Lines, and Dead Ends   You...

Order your review chronologically . You’ve probably come across this idea before – or maybe toyed with it yourself, especially if you’re sitting on a massive pile of notes and wondering what to do next. You know you have to corral it all somehow, give it some sort of structure, turn it into a chapter or section worth someone’s time to read. But how?  The Temptation This is when the chronological temptation starts creeping in. Every finding has a year on it. The years can be grouped together. Look, I can start right now – there’s a cluster from 2015 . . .  It feels like you are doing something. If feels like you are bringing order to chaos. It feels like you are finally making progress and sorting it all out.  Beware of those feelings.  The Reality There are many ways to bring order to chaos. You could organise findings alphabetically by the surnames of their authors. Or you could group findings by the different journals they appear in. Or according to the order you ...

How Do You Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising?  This is an excellent question. And a very fair one. Research textbooks, advisors, the handy checklists and self-study videos – all of them will tell you that a literature review must synthesise previous sources, not summarise them.  Fine. But how do you do that? Advice on this is harder to find, leaving many of us tearing our hair out in frustration. I know that’s how I felt, back when I was surrounded by piles of papers and stacks of notes and wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing with it all.  That’s why I’m dedicating this blog, the first of 2026, to the how in how to stop summarising and start synthesising.  But First, Some Preliminaries Summarising is what happens if you describe individual studies one at a time ( this study said this; that study showed that ). This doesn’t put anything new in the world – it only reports on information that already exists. Synthesis, in contrast, is all about f...

✍ In this blog, I typically focus on writing dissertation literature reviews. In today’s blog, however, I want to shift gears ⚙️ a bit and focus on you -- the dissertation literature review writer.   What kind of writer are you?  Whoa there , you might be thinking. Writers have ‘kinds’?   Yes, it’s true – we don’t all write the same way. 🫨 🟣 Some people, as Sky Marsen outlines in her excellent book Professional Writing* , are bottom-up writers. We start by generating ideas, collecting information, and gathering data. This results in a massive pile of stuff 📚, which we then sift, sort, evaluate and eventually structure once we figure out our argument -- what we think all this stuff is ultimately saying. We are the types who tend to write the outline last.  🟣 Other people are top-down writers. Top-down writers generate the outline of what they're writing first📋, and then attack their pile of stuff, slotting in the ideas, information, and data they've collected wit...

🔸Do a critical appraisal🔸 If you are a research student, you'll run into an assignment like this one sooner or later. But what is it really asking you to do? 🤔 The guidebooks will offer you clear, crisp definitions of what a critical appraisal is , like this one:  ❝The use of explicit, transparent methods to assess the data in published research, by systematically considering such factors as validity, adherence to reporting standards, methods, conclusion and generalisability❞ (from Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review , pg. 304). Excellent! Now you know that you need to be explicit , transparent , and systematic . You need to assess the data in the research that has been published in your field. And there are any number of checklists 📋 you can consult that will help you zero in on what to look for ( Are the conclusions warranted by the data? Does the analysis stand up? Does the study measure what it says it will measure? Have the methods been robustly just...

 Happy New Year! 🥳 Here it is, the start of January, often a time to sit down and make some firm resolutions that, this year, we are really going to stick to. So if you have your bullet point list already populated with things like: 🔆 Get up an hour earlier and write for 1 hour everyday 🔆 Read and annotate 5 articles every week 🔆 Have the complete first draft of my literature review chapter done by March 31st,  great stuff! Keep going. This time of year is also, however, a good time to take stock -- to step back and reassess things. Are we doing the right things for the right reasons? Over the course of a year, it is very easy to get so bogged down in the details that we lose sight of our real mission. We set out with a clear vision, translate that vision into goals, and then set out the tasks to achieve those goals. But over time, the tasks tend to take on a life of their own and without realising it they become the mission. Just get to the end of the list! we say to our...

 It is that time of year again. 🎄🎉 We are frantically getting those last things done, running around buying presents 🎁, writing cards, and doing all the other things we do to prepare for the holiday season. If, in amongst all that you are also one of those brave people writing a dissertation 📚, you might also be setting aside some precious undistracted time to work on your literature review. In honour of the season, I wanted to share with you my 12 most successful mistakes. Yes, you read that correctly  -- successful mistakes. Doing anything for the first time involves some stumbling around, and I certainly did my share of that. It was when I fell down and got back up that I learned the most, and in this blog that is what I want to share with you.  So, here it is -- my 12 most productive mistakes from 30 years of writing literature reviews and what they taught me. 1. Not understanding the role of description. If you read my blog regularly, you'll know your literature ...

It is that time of year again. August has drawn to a close and we are now into September. The shops have their school stationary front and centre – pens of all kinds, piles of printer paper, shiny new notebooks in all manner of designs, just waiting for your brilliant ideas. Ah, yes – the start of the academic year.  If you’re an MA student or a doctoral candidate, these golden days on the cusp of autumn may find you embarking on your dissertation, which typically starts with your literature review. What’s out there on your topic? What do we already know, or think we know? What is the lay of the land in your subject? As the autumn sunshine streams through your window, you’ll be digging into a stack of research articles and filling up one of your shiny new notebooks or its electronic equivalent.  So what do you do with all this material you are collecting – all the findings, all the quotes, all the conclusions, and all the thoughts you have about these things? How do you turn t...

 Have a dissertation deadline looming? Still wrestling with your literature review chapter? Or just generally stuck on what to do with that pile of notes and papers? Here are my top five tips for you, just in time for the start of 2024.  1. Remember that your literature review is an argument . You are not describing the articles you read to show what you know.  You show what you know by using the findings, conclusions, and insights from previous work in your field as evidence in an argument that establishes why your research question should be asked. 2. Approach your literature review like an explorer.  Think of previous work in your field as the unknown terrain you have to make sense of. Invest time in the card-sorting technique up front as you venture into this terrain to save time later. Convert your notes into cards, with one thought, sentence, quote, finding, etc. per card, and then begin sorting. 3. As you sort, say to yourself, 'My research question needs to b...

Data can be confusing when it comes to your literature review.  Does your literature review have data? Do you deal with data when you are writing it? If your literature review has to be an analysis rather than a description -- which it does -- what are you analyzing, exactly?  Today's blog is about these questions. First, though, let's offer a definition of data.  Data , in a broad sense, is any information we collect systematically to answer a question.  In research, we usually think of data as the stuff we deal with in our analysis and results chapters.  That is, data is what we have elicited from our participants, be they texts or people, to answer our research question. This is sometimes called our primary data and it is of course crucial and essential.  But collecting and analyzing data also applies when you are doing your literature review. While we tend to think of literature reviews as a very long exercise in reading, you are doing much more than ...

When you sit down to start your literature review and come to the realization that you have no idea what to do, there are any number of guidebooks out there you could consult. But how helpful are they? I recently started thinking about this when I happened to pull my copy of Phillips & Pugh's How to Get a Phd*  off my book shelf.  I smiled to myself as I dusted it off and thumbed through the pages, catching sight of the notes I'd written in the margin. But what IS my position?! I had scrawled urgently on one page. 'Researchers examine data critically' I had emphatically underlined on another (48). In many ways this was a useful book. It had a wealth of information on the nature of a PhD, what it was and wasn't; about the postgraduate and PhD system in the UK; about the supervision process; about the nature of research; and so on.  Another thing I remembered, however, was how confused I was about that thing called  the literature review . I do not blame Phillips...

In a recent post, I noted that annotated bibliographies are not the same as literature reviews.  An annotated bibliography is a list that describes each source you've read while a literature review is an argument that uses previous work in your field as evidence to establish why your research question needs to be asked.   But does that mean you shouldn't do an annotated bibliography? Actually, no -- you should.  Annotated bibliographies and other kinds of lists are an important tool you can use while you are drafting your literature review.   Few people (at least amongst my students and mentees over the years) seem to realize this -- my suggestions to make and analyze lists in order to get a literature review off the ground often come as a bit of a surprise.  I think that is because lists are widely misunderstood. When we think of lists, we tend think of everyday ephemera -- the shopping list on the back of an envelope, the to-do lists on a scatter of ...

  No.  It really, really isn't.  An annotated bibliography is an alphabetized list of all the sources you have read with a short summary given for each one.  It might take a long time and a lot of work to do your annotated bibliography.  You have to read all the sources, figure out what they say, and then summarize that in reasonable prose.  But this does not take much critical thinking and it does not require you to do anything original, which is why you will get comments like 'needs development' or 'not a literature review' or 'no critical voice here' if you just convert your annotated bibliography into paragraph form and think you are done. In an annotated bibliography, you don't have to analyze what each source said and come to any sort of view about how the findings and conclusions from each source relate to each other and to your particular research question.  Neither does an annotated bibliography require you to formulate and structure an argume...

As you are preparing to do your literature review, you might be reading up on them.  Most research methodology textbooks have a chapter or two on the literature review, as do the many guides you can find on writing your dissertation or thesis project.  Such texts can be useful in many ways, and when it comes to the literature review they will typically tell you a host of things.  The literature review is where you demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of your field.  The literature review is where you critically appraise prior research relevant to your topic. The literature review is where you identify common themes, patterns, and issues in the existing body of research.  The literature review is where you assess previous findings in relation to methodological strengths and weaknesses.  The literature review is where you define what has been done in your field and delineate what has not been done. A good literature review will do all of these things.  Howe...