Speaker 1: Welcome to the UCD Writing Centre. My name is Michael Pei and I'm a tutor here and today we're going to be running an online tutorial on how to write a literature review. I'm going to take you through the specifics on how to write the review and the point of this tutorial is to give you the tools and insights that you will need to be able to create a review that is right for you, your subject area, and can be completed in a timely and efficient manner. You will see as we go through the piece that there is no one-size-fits-all review type. As such, you can take, borrow from, or rejig anything you see here today as long as it suits your needs. So one of the first questions people generally ask is, what is a literature review? And there are many variations, but the most basic answer is that it is a piece of writing that maps the current state of knowledge in your field in a way that allows you to put your own research into perspective. So it allows you to gauge the field in a critical way by assessing major contributions. It ensures continuous development of analytical and critical skills, and this is particularly important as opposed to writing in reports or essay writings. The literature review encourages you to engage with the primary materials that you will be placing your own research in. You are able to position yourself in that regard. It also allows you to practice your writing. Literature reviews are sometimes written in a kind of rough and ready manner, but I would encourage you to focus on creating a narrative in your review. It just means that your ability to write academically and to think academically and analytically, it just means you will be constantly practicing that while you are also gauging the state of knowledge in the field. So it can be useful beyond just actually mapping the field itself. Finally, and the most obvious point, is you cannot make a contribution to knowledge if you don't have a clear grasp of the major points of the field. So the layout of this presentation is as follows. We'll begin with where to start, how to search, how to assess a source, active reading strategies, how to structure your review. We'll have a look at a sample review, some shortcuts you can use to make the process a little easier and a little faster. And finally, we'll have a list of other resources that you can use for further research into the review. So where to start. The first thing you have to think about are what are the major databases that have been recommended to me by my tutors and lecturers. A lot of people begin the review process by looking through Google Scholar with several quickly chosen keywords. The issue with this approach is that you'll either get far too many results or far too few. And they may not be specific enough to the questions that you need to answer in your review. So you need to speak to your lecturer, your colleagues, your tutor, whoever it is, to ensure that you're getting the correct portals to search through and you're looking at the correct magazines, books, et cetera. You need to consider central research questions and come up with keywords from these. I generally come up with three or four central research questions. What they do is they refer to the overall title of the review. And by answering those three or four questions, I can safely say that I have basically completed my objectives in mapping a particular section of the field, what I want to look at in the literature review. You should always talk to your colleagues and classmates when you're doing a literature review. It's very easy to do a literature review in isolation. And it's always better to talk to people, to point to the different things that you found, the different points that you'd like to address, see if they've come across them, see if they can recommend any other critiques or articles that might improve your position or where you're coming from. You should always title your literature review angled towards your objectives. As such, don't simply write a literature review called the Postcolonial Studies Literature Review, for example. You'll want a title that's particularly angled towards the objectives of the review. And we'll be going through this later in this tutorial. And also, you should draw up your bibliography. It's one of the first things you should do. A lot of people get slightly intimidated by this because there are obviously so many different sources to choose from. So we're going to have a look at some software that's available to us to make this process a little bit easier a little later in this tutorial. So how to search. Create your three or four central research questions according to what you want to achieve in the review. And pick your keywords very, very carefully. You want your keywords to be subject-specific. You want to make sure that you're picking words that are adequate to your area. If you forget a particular theoretical term or a term that's useful to addressing the issues that you want addressed, you won't be able to get the correct resources. So you need to make sure that your terms are carefully chosen. You can use the wildcard function in lots of search engines. It's usually a star. And this basically means that, for example, if you type in the word run, it will also search for words like running, et cetera. So it won't delimit your searches to the very precise parameters of the word. It'll open up the parameters slightly. This can be useful if you're getting far too few results. If you're getting far too many, your keywords are probably too general and you need to refine them. Ensure that your search portal is appropriate and that you have a list of journals that you need to look at. For example, again, if you are doing a post-colonial studies literature review and you don't have the Journal of Commonwealth Literature listed as one of the journals you need to look through, there is a good chance that you will miss a pivotal intervention or article that will allow you to map the state of the field. So you need to have a list of journals and portals, the Taylor & Francis online portal, JSTOR, Project News, whatever they are, that have access to these journals. Your lecturers, your tutors will generally know about these and they're usually accessible via library websites in your university or institution. You can also check if the article is cited a lot on a lot of search portals. This is really useful. If an article is quite recent and has a lot of citations, it might be quite important in terms of where the field is going. So it's good to make a note of that. And generally, you should make sure that the article is peer-reviewed. Oryxweb.com is a service that allows you to check for this, but it's not always available through your institution. If you go to the About section of a journal online, usually it will explain whether or not the article itself is peer-reviewed, which is important. The peer-review process, just very briefly, is basically a way of ensuring academic originality and integrity with articles that are written. Articles are submitted, checked by experts for veracity, whether they fit the journal's expectations, and if they're making an original contribution to knowledge, and then it goes through a whole editorial process before it's sent out. So that's basically what the peer-review process is. Assessing a source. Usually it's not enough to just read the title of an article. You should also have a look at the abstract and maybe the first few lines of the introduction. Run this against your keywords and central research questions, and if they match, make a note that you will possibly be using it in your literature review piece. At this stage, remember, we're just assessing what sources we want to use, so just to make a note of that. You should then check if the theoretical framework is adequately conceptualized. You can generally get a hint of this by reading the first few paragraphs of the piece. And if you feel that the framework doesn't quite live up to what it should in terms of the objectives of the article that you're reading, just make a note of this also. In qualitative studies in particular environments, check if there is any indication that the results may have been tampered with in order to fulfill a research expectation. A lot of the time, these sorts of things are unconscious. We all have our biases, and researchers and academics, of course, are not immune from this. Also make sure that the sample size is adequate. If you are citing results that have an inadequate sample size, obviously the conclusions of the experiment might over-determine its importance if the sample size is too small. Just to be aware of all of these things, make comments, make footnotes, just make sure you don't take something at its exact word. The point of the literature review is to be completely analytical, consistently analytical. You're always questioning the work as you're going through it. And again, is the article or book cited a lot? It might mean that it's a pivotal intervention. So we've spoken a lot about how to assess sources, how to find sources, but keeping track of them is a different story. Now we're lucky that there are some programs available to us that make this process a lot easier. So I have two examples here, Zotero and Mendley. I personally use Zotero. It is an add-on that you can use with Google Chrome, and basically it allows you to note all your sources with a click. Once you download Zotero and use it as an add-on, a new image will appear and you can click it, and it will save the bibliographical information of any article that you think might be useful. It means that you don't have to go to the trouble of switching between documents on your laptop or writing them down if you don't want to write them down. Just with the click of a mouse, you can log the article. The information stays logged forever. It's in the cloud, so you can access it from any location. It's very useful because it means you don't have to be overly discerning with the pieces that you're picking. If you feel like a piece might be relevant but you're not sure, just click it. If you don't use it, you don't use it. It's logged forever. It was only a click of a mouse. It's not too much trouble. So now we move on to picking the sources that we're going to use specifically for the literature review. So you found X number of key texts and X amount of other relevant works. I should point out now, there's no set amount of sources for a literature review. Generally, if you're using 40 or 50, you're probably a bit on the high side. Usually, something around 20 to 30 is adequate. Again, it's something you should discuss with your lecturer, your tutor. It depends if you're a master's student, PhD student. You'll get a feel for it the more reviews you do within your own subject area. You should look through Zotero and pick out key articles. So this is where Zotero becomes particularly useful. You'll have all the articles lined up. You can have a look again at the titles, any comments or notes that you've made about them, and you begin to discern which ones are particularly relevant for the review. Check that the articles feature your keywords. See if they're written by established scholars. Obviously, you'll need a certain amount of those to show that you're aware of the major contributors to the field. And you can also make use of already existing review articles. You'll often find these in peer-reviewed journals where someone will have written an article about three or four books, recently published research results, where they basically try and map the current state of the field or the contributions of particular authors. They can be very useful shortcuts to allow you to kind of gauge the state of the field without perhaps having to do a completely in the dark on your own. It's always worth thinking about who wrote the review. Is it a graduate student? Is it an established academic? What kind of things might affect the way they approach the piece? Is a framework of their analysis relevant to your objectives? All of these things are worth considering. So now that you've picked your sources, reading them adequately is obviously very important. So this is active reading. So you're going to want to read analytically. You don't want to read passively. You constantly want to think about what you're looking for and what your objectives are in the review. So have your keywords in mind and mark the margins with them. Write notes in the margins. Compare to other pieces as you read. So as you've read three or four different articles, you might begin to discern the different schools of thought in a subject area, particular academics who pair up better in the review piece. Write that in the margin. You're constantly trying to cross-reference. You're constantly exercising your brain to think in an analytical way to try and gauge what's going on in the field at a particular time. And the McGraw Centre recommends that you don't highlight. Make a note instead. Many times people bring literature reviews into the UCD Writing Centre and they might have a selection of articles that have many, many highlights on them but no notes. And when the students then try to take the information to create the review, they haven't written any notes, so they don't really know why they highlighted a section because they can't remember. So the trick is to write down, instead of highlighting, write down why it's worth highlighting. That way you'll know what you're doing when you return to look at the work a week or two later or whatever it is. And again, talk about it with someone. If you're looking at a particularly interesting article or report, talk about it with your lecturer, your tutor, your supervisor, your colleagues, anyone who might be interested. Constantly thinking about its validity, its relevance to your review piece. Structure. You should use subheadings. It allows you to break up the review and makes it easier to navigate. The essential research questions that you come up with can act as subheadings at the beginning. You'll know what bit of information you want to put in a particular section of paragraphs. If your instructor doesn't want you to use subheadings in your literature review, you can just delete them at the end and hand it up and it'll just flow as a piece of work with different paragraphs. You can do that kind of editorial stuff at the end. But particularly while you're doing the review, it's a good idea to have subheadings. You can also use a color code which can make it a lot easier to recall information. We'll see in the review sample that I'm going to show in a few minutes how a color code recalls particular research questions within the review itself. And cross-referencing. You should keep everything connected. Constantly bring up other critics, other positions. Try and gauge how critics rub off each other, the particular ways that they might look at a subject in comparison to other critics. That's the point of the review. You're comparing and contrasting in order to position yourself in the field. You should only use essential quotations. This is particularly important. A common mistake is that people use lots of block quotations and their argument is that the critic's work is too complex to be broken down into paragraphs. And that's understandable, but the issue is that you simply won't remember or really understand what the person is saying if you're just using block quotations. If you can't put it into your own words, the odds are you don't have a great understanding of it. So you need to just slow down, read a chapter, set yourself a challenge, give yourself three sentences to summarize the chapter in relation to the other work that you have done. That's the stuff that should go in the literature review. Particularly important quotations you should include. And I'll show you an example of this again in a couple of minutes when we move on to our sample pieces of literature reviews. You should use footnotes and comments. As I said earlier, comments and footnotes just allow you to kind of consider the sources outside of the literature review. If you feel that methodology isn't adequate, if you're concerned about the particular biases of a particular researcher, just a comment, just while you're doing the review. You can delete it at the end or you can keep it for yourself, just for your own little notes outside of the review parameters. You should have a bibliography as well as a works cited. Your works cited can be the works that you specifically analyzed in the review. Your bibliography are the larger works that you might come back to if you want to improve the review in any way, if you want to double check a source or read a source that you decided not to use in the review the first time, but that you think at this stage of your research career might actually be worth having a look at. So our first sample is from a postcolonial studies literature review. You should always do an abstract at the beginning of a literature review. The point of an abstract is to basically gauge what the review is about, what are the main points you're going to address, and what is the conclusion that you're going to demonstrate at the end. It's not like an introduction which lays out what you're going to do. It's much more complete than that. And it's usually about 100 to 150 words. So this is a sample abstract. This literature review seeks to clarify the different approaches to postcolonial studies and literature. Looking at the field through methodologies of Marxism, hybridity, subaltern studies, and eco-criticism, the review demonstrates how these different approaches have particular strengths and weaknesses in their historiography as well as their modes of aesthetic and formal analysis. Ultimately, the review concludes that the four approaches are distinct but share certain features and that particular areas are more suited to certain texts over others. This suggests that championing one particular approach might risk doing violence to a particular text. And then I follow this up with keywords that I used in my search parameters. Again, you may not be allowed to hand up a literature review piece with keywords. Just delete them. I mean, my approach to literature reviews is the piece that you hand up is all very well and good. But the more information you have when you're looking back over a literature review, whether you're traveling to a conference or about to discuss a paper with a colleague, the more information, the better. You can see here that the abstract uses the correct terminology. In the case of postcolonial studies, it tries to address what the author considers are the four main areas about the field. It uses vocabulary that may not be overly familiar to the non-expert but is assumed familiar to the person reading the review. Your introduction. So you should give an overview of the research topic. For example here, qualitative approaches to consumer psychology generally focus on, or political realism is principally informed by, it is used in order to, and then you just fill out those gaps. You should then point out the precise parameters within the topic that you are going to research. And then I would also list the subheadings and explain very briefly the general focus of each subheading. So those three or four subheadings that I discussed earlier, just list them under the introduction. You can delete this later if you want. It's just to keep you focused while you're actually doing the review piece. You can refer back to that when you're actually doing the writing in the paragraphs. And you should set forth your overall aims with regard to the central research questions, which will evolve while you're doing your research. So that aims section, you might want to return to it nearer the end. So here we have four sample subheadings with a colour code. We have Marxism in red, hybridity in blue, subaltern in purple, and eco-criticism in green. So you can see that the questions are very specific to what I want to address in a particular section of the review. You can see as well that I've listed the main names in particular subfields of post-colonial studies. All of this basically allows me to very rapidly recall information if I'm looking over the review again. It's all about making sure that you can recall things when you're glancing through this to make it as clear as possible to signpost it the whole way through. The colour code also just exercises other bits of your brain that reading in black and white don't. So it can be very useful for recalling information. So here we have a sample paragraph from a literature review. In this case, post-colonial approaches to Scottish literature. What I want you to notice is how some of the names are highlighted according to a colour code, and that two names are in bold to signal that they're from another literature review. So now what we're seeing is we're cross-referencing between different literature reviews. They're all speaking to our own overall understanding of subject areas. So you're beginning to increase your own pool of knowledge. You're getting more comfortable with talking about work in your field. So I'm just going to read through the piece now. In his introduction to Scottish literature and post-colonial literature, the first comparative collection of its kind, Michael Gardner claims that by learning the lessons of the post-colonial English literature departments teaching Scottish texts will prevent issues of Celtic lavism, the Scottish greats and canon formation in the English style. Yet investigation suggests that the collection is one of canon authors in the post-colonial framework, perhaps in an effort to call to mind a stability through familiarity, which does not really exist in post-colonial studies, still a hugely contentious field. As Liam Connell suggests, the academic capital of post-colonial theory resulted in Scottish literary academics applying post-colonial models to Scottish literature and culture to widen the interest globally, particularly in North American universities. Yet Scottish post-colonial interventions do recognise the importance of material history and provide provocative readings, particularly in refining the coloniser-colonised dualism in Scotland, as will now be demonstrated. So you can see this is a paragraph that sets up the next paragraph. You can see that there is an essential quotation on the third line, lessons of the post-colonial. The reasons you might want to leave a quotation in are because you think it particularly captures something in a book or article that you're reviewing. So you can see there that you can actually summarise positions in a couple of lines over a paragraph. That's how the review should work. It should be that quick. So now concluding the review, what are the major trends and who are the major contributors? Just make a note of that. And most importantly, what gaps do you feel can be exploited or require more analysis? Can you contribute? You need to establish this in your concluding section, just to show what was the point of the review in the first place. And finally, you need to ask yourself, is the review worth continuing and updating or are you happy that any further research would require a wholly new approach? If by the end of your review and you've concluded it, say you've taken three or four weeks of it, you're still not happy about it, you need to talk to your supervisor. Don't just try and fix it on your own if you've already spent a substantial amount of time on it. You might need a bit of guidance. They might recommend that you get rid of some critics, incorporate others, maybe a new subject area to look at, that sort of thing. So you should just talk to your supervisor if that happens. So some useful shortcuts. Don't read everything. Take a short note of an abstract with a footnote. That's going back to how we take notes using Zotero. Take little notes while you're using Zotero of particularly useful points. Only list the principal authors below your subheadings. It's just very useful for looking over notes quickly before going into meetings, before going into conferences. You just want to refresh everything. Set a time limit, generally no more than four weeks, a couple of hours most days. If it's getting out of control, talk to someone. And you should also look for reviews in major journals, book reviews or review articles that take on a couple of articles or a couple of books, chart a trajectory in a particular subfield of a topic, that sort of thing. I just want to show an example of that now in this book review, Ireland and Eco-Criticism Towards a Trajectory. Now, whether or not you're in this subject doesn't necessarily matter. You'll see reviews like this in peer review journals. As you can see, four books are listed at the beginning. And if you read the opening paragraph, it's a review piece that maps a trajectory. So even if you disagree with the findings, even if you disagree with the methodology, you might find that this particular piece is useful. It probably has other articles that might be of interest to your own work, and it will show you particular directions that the topic is going in that you can look at. So now we just have some other resources that you can have a look at to improve your own literature reviews. Some of these are subject specific, but they're all very useful in their own ways. And the last resource has sample literature reviews for subject specific areas. So you might find your own subject in that particular website. So thank you very much for watching the UCD Writing Centre presentation, How to Write a Literature Review Without Melting Down. I wish you the very best of luck in your writing.