3 Tips to Simplify Writing a Literature Review

Writing a literature review can be overwhelming with the large amount of research that is required. Depending on your research topic, you may need to gather numerous sources to complete a thorough review of the literature. From personal experience, my doctoral literature review required a minimum of 100 sources. This requirement was to fulfill the minimum page length of 50 pages for the literature review portion of the dissertation.

Developing a research strategy will allow you to focus on the desired topic, allow you to organize your sources, and help you identify when the topic has been thoroughly researched. The research process serves as the foundation for conducting a thorough literature review.

The following three tips will simplify the process and provide a brief outline for structuring a literature review.

1. Develop Subtopics

When your desired research topic has been chosen, it is important to break down your topic into subtopics. This process can be done by developing an outline with a phrase that identifies a section of your research project. For example, if you chose to research the popularity of sports within the United States, your subtopics would be as follows:

Topic: Sports

Subtopics: Football, Baseball, Basketball

2. Develop Questions for Each Subtopic

Once your subtopics have been developed, it is time to do the research. To thoroughly address each subtopic, ask yourself as many questions pertaining to each of the developed subtopics. This technique is something I found extremely useful throughout my literature review.

Once you have exhausted all of the questions for each subtopic, you now have the questions that you will be seeking answers to throughout the literature. Below is an example of each subtopic with the respective questions to seek answers to.

Influence of Social Media on Investing How does social media impact investing and how is it used? How does social media gamify investing? Benefits and disadvantages of using social media for investing Why is social media used by investors?

Tendencies of Retail Investors Why are retail traders more susceptible to using social media as financial advice? What do retail investors look for when using social media for an investment decision Provide evidence of studies that indicate how retail investors use social media. What platforms do retail investors use to make investments? (Robinhood)

In higher education, you will use academic journals to find peer-reviewed articles to answer each of the questions. Once you have gathered enough resources to thoroughly answer each question, you must organize your sources.

3. Organize Your Sources

In a literature review, organization is key. With numerous sources being gathered, it is important to stay organized and develop a process to avoid information overload. Consider using Zotero, a free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data. You may also consider creating folders (physical or digital), labeled with each subtopic. This will allow you to distribute all of the related articles to the respective folder. This process will visually help organize all of your material, making it easier to write your literature review.

Once you have gathered sufficient information from your sources to answer each of the questions in paragraph form, you can simply delete the question and combine each of your responses with a transition statement. This continuous process will form your literature review as you address each question within each subtopic accordingly.

Conclusion

Writing a literature review can be a daunting task. The research process required to complete a literature review can be lengthy. However, by incorporating the tips I have outlined, you will save some time, making the process easier to manage. At the end of the day, your job is to review the literature for your desired research topic and provide the reader with an overview of the previously published works. By the end of this process, you will have acquired a tremendous amount of knowledge on your research topic, which is by far the most rewarding.

References

If you enjoyed this article, follow me to stay up to date with my most recent publications.