How to get started on a literature review

Tips and tricks that I both teach and practice - Part 1 of 2

I personally always felt that literature reviews are tricky things to get right. Maybe that is because my research is mostly interdisciplinary, which makes reviewing the literature (and selecting which literature to review) even more tricky than it already is. But positioning one’s research within wider debates in one (or more) fields is both difficult and consequential.

Like so many things in life, your own practice improves when you have to teach these skills. Right now, we are starting the annual cycle of Master’s Dissertations, so I am back to explaining literature reviews to my students. For these students, dissertations are often the first time that they are confronted with the tasks of independent research. Because in many higher education systems abroad, dissertations are not necessarily required at the undergraduate level.

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Even more problematic is that many students don’t really like to read, or at least not academic literature. And while some seem to believe that AI can just do it for them, the reality is that it is difficult to write decent prompts and adequately assess AI output if you don’t know what you are looking for.

So, at the end of the day, AI tools can assist students in comprehending the literature, but they will still need to understand how to review the literature critically and present this clearly. But more on this some other time.

How to help students with literature reviews

In my experience, this starts with clarifying what we mean by literature, as opposed to data. Many students have only written essays and reports at this point, and often do not see the difference between types of documents.

It also helps to highlight that referencing other people's work in their research actually makes their research look better, because it allows them to demonstrate what they know and that they are able to build on it.

So when I teach this, I teach both basic steps and fundamental techniques — some of which I have found helpful for my own research and publishing. We don’t often talk about these basics, but the fundamental practices of research are actually very useful in my view.

What this post and next will cover:

• What is a literature review? And what does a good one do?

• Finding academic literature — and why snowballing is still the best approach in my book

• Why and how to reference other people’s work — especially if you are an interdisciplinary researcher!

• How to read academic work effectively (Part 2)

• How to take notes — sounds basic, but is very important (Part 2)

• How to structure the literature review (Part 2)

• Some further reading suggestions and other resources. (Part 2)

The literature review "standing on the shoulders of giants" (Sir Isaac Newton).