Speaker 1: A literature review is one of the most challenging assignments you'll face as a student. The stack of books, journals, and articles can quickly get overwhelming if you don't have a system to organise your resources and thoughts. Lucky for you, getting organised is easier than you think. Hey guys, it's Paul here. I have written my fair share of literature reviews, so I think I have some authority on the subject. So I'm going to give you 5 tips for writing an A-grade worthy literature review that have proven to work, because they did for me. Tip 1. Narrow down your research question. Trust me, the broader your question, the harder it's going to be for you to find resources. Not having a specific goal in mind will lead you down random rabbit holes and have you save hundreds of research papers, overwhelming you further. Start with a general question, and go down into specifics. For example, if you're in an archaeology class reviewing existing literature on Ancient Egypt, Ancient Egypt is a very vague topic and you'll end up with a million resources. Instead, narrow it down to a specific time period or pharaoh and focus on that. The narrower you make it, the more manageable it'll be. Tip 2. Use the PICO method. The PICO, P-I-C-O-T, method is an organisational tool mostly used to help with the writing process. It stands for Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Time. So if we go back to our example of Ancient Egypt, let's say you decided to review the literature on King Tutankhamen's reign in Ancient Egypt. P is for Population, where you define the population or group of people your research will focus on. In this case, the person is King Tutankhamen. I is for Intervention, which is the identification of the varial being studied. In this case, you could be studying a specific aspect of his rule. C is for Comparison, where you identify the control group in the study. Here, the comparison group could be either other pharaohs from Ancient Egypt. O is for Outcomes, which is pretty self-explanatory, and in your case, the outcomes can be the impact of his rule on Ancient Egyptian society, depending on the focus of your paper. And finally, T, which stands for Time. This is the time frame of your study. The time frame here would be the entire time that Tutankhamen was in power. Three, be selective. Being selective in your research approach is the best way to help yourself not get overwhelmed. There will be tons of experts with fascinating papers and theories on your topic, but you can't use them all. Being selective allows you to focus your efforts on the most relevant information and avoid being bogged down. I recommend reading the summaries of papers that you find to determine whether they're useful or not. If the summary barely mentions your research question, you should probably set it aside. Don't throw it away, because you never know what information it could have. Save all your research links in an Excel sheet and keep the less relevant things for last. That way, you can always come back to it, but you're not wasting time on it. Tip four, skim. Don't read. Hold on. I'm not saying you shouldn't read the literature for a literature review, but a lot of times you might pick a resource that isn't relevant, and you don't want to spend precious time reading the entire thing and having it to go to waste. To prevent that, skim the text first. Wait no more than 5-10 minutes per resource, only to determine whether the paper will be useful or not. At this point, you're just refining your resource list to make it easier for you. Once you've refined that list, it's time to deep dive into the literature. But don't go in with no strategy. Pay attention to things what most researchers are assuming, what methods they've used to conduct studies, any conflicting theories, and whether or not their findings still hold true today. Tip five, analyse, don't describe. A literature review isn't about summarising a book you read. One common problem most students have is describing what they read instead of evaluating it and comparing it to other literature. A good way to see if you're making this mistake is to check if all your paragraphs start with the name of the author. If it does, you probably need to rethink your approach and refocus your efforts on the central question. Of course, you could make things easier for yourself and check out EduBirdie. Head to the website and use this code on the screen to get 10% off your first order with EduBirdie. And be sure to subscribe to this channel for more tips and tricks on writing great papers. Thanks for watching. www.edubirdie.co.uk