Conducting a Literature Review

Planning Your Literature Review

Before getting started with a literature review, it's helpful think through some of the the steps in the process, including tools you may use for project management, organizing your citations, or how you will document your search terms and search strategies, etc.

You also need to make sure your research question is well defined, and that you've determined what will be included or excluded in the scope of your research.

1. Define your thesis/research question.

Before searching for sources, you need have a well-developed research question. This will help focus your literature review, and guide how you conduct the project. It will also help with information gathering because it will provide you with key words or concepts you can use in your search.

Coming up with a well-developed research question also requires research! What you’re aiming to understand in your preliminary scan of the literature is what is the academic conversation around your topic area. What is known about your topic so far, and what critical questions are yet unanswered? These unanswered questions may become opportunities for a unique, meaningful research topic, or research question.

TIP: If you're still developing your research question, or aren't sure what to do before you know what your question is, this ebook can help:

Mullaney, T. S., & Rea, C. (2022). Where research begins : choosing a research project that matters to you (and the world). The University of Chicago Press.

Librarians can also be helpful in teaching strategies for narrowing a topic, finding the gap in the literature, and more! Make an appointment here.

2. Determine the scope.

A literature review determines where your research question falls within the body of research within a discipline. Some things to keep in mind:

Cast a wide search at first to find all the related material to your topic.
Then select the most relevant source material as it pertains to your topic and purpose.

In determining the scope, or inclusion/ exclusion criteria, consider:

time periods
key topic publications and the time between them.
location and population of the research and for your question
gender
age group
culture/ethnicity
theoretical framework
methodology (e.g., qualitative or quantitative, fieldwork/ethnography)
interdisciplinary fields - are there adjacent areas in which this type of research has been conducted that you would like to include?

Tools & Apps for Organizing your Research

To save time and stay organized throughout the literature review process, decide how you will keep track of, organize and store your citations, search strategies, and documents before you start researching!

Consider how you will:

Manage Citations

Using a Citation Management tool will save you a lot of time and effort by keeping all your sources and files organized and easily accessible, enabling you create bibliographies automatically as you write, and more.

Popular citation management tools include:

Zotero, RefWorks, Mendeley, EndNote

Check out the library guide on citation management for more information, handy tutorials, and more!

Organize Notes & Project Management

Using note-taking, and project management/ organization apps will help you with organizing and easily accessing your notes, sources, task management and more, so you save time and increase efficiency.

Powernotes can help make your research and writing process more efficient and easier by automatically capturing text, taking notes, and exporting citations in an outline format, all without ever leaving the article PDF or website you’re currently reading.
Notion helps to organize your research materials, outline your chapters, and track your progress with a dissertation planner template.

Keep track of Keywords, Search Strategies, Search Alerts

Create an account in frequently used database platforms like ProQuest or EBSCO if you want to save search results, keep track of search alerts, etc.
Use a Word document or a spreadsheet to track search terms, databases searched, and overall search strategy:

Examples:

Research Log (Word)

Search Tracker (Excel)