The Lit Review Funnel: From Broad Context to Clear Gap (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, Professor Stuckler here. Today, I want to walk you through the number one lit review mistake I see over and over, and I'm going to show you exactly how to fix it today, once and for all. This is really going to help if any of this sounds like you. You feel like you're going in circles, you're drowning in papers, your supervisor shared feedback, like your review is descriptive but not analytical, or you've been told there's no synthesis, or it's not at the graduate level. Here's the thing. All these are symptoms of the same underlying root cause, and the fix is deceptively simple. You need to know where your literature review is going and going to end, because if you don't know the destination, it's almost impossible not to get lost. And the way we're going to fix that in this video is I'm going to show you a key concept, the lit review funnel. For context, I've published over 400 peer-reviewed papers, and I've coached and mentored hundreds of researchers to go from start all the way through to finish and publishing a high-impact journal. I can tell you this confidently that a lot of these mistakes are just never taught explicitly. You're expected to figure it out. Many people don't, and that's exactly why this problem keeps repeating itself. So, in this video, what I'm going to do is, first, I'm going to show you what a literature review is actually for. Then, I'm going to share with you the correct model of the funnel. I'm going to show you then some common mistakes that can help you diagnose what might be going wrong in your funnel, and I'm going to really help you handle that end stage properly so you can deliver on what your review needs to do. Again, no tools, no fancy technology, no AI or software, just the thinking in this video. So, let's dive straight in. So, first, I need to correct a common misconception about lit reviews. A lot of people are taught implicitly that a literature review is just summarize what everyone else has said. Except, that's not entirely true. A lit review is not just a boring summary of prior studies. It's actually a strategic argument that answers a key question and makes a case for why does your study need to exist. So, if you finish your literature review and you haven't gotten to the end point without justifying the whole raison d'etre, the reason, the meaning, the existence of your study, your lit review chapter has failed because it's not doing the one job that it has to do. So, the correct model for a literature review is a funnel. And in the funnel, every strong literature review is going to fall this shape of being broad to narrowing to get more focused to ultimately getting more precise to delivering at the end a gap. And that gap will typically flow into your research question and later on into your methods. That is sometimes what we call the North Star alignment sequence in our program. And literally, there's a feeling when that all lines up, it just clicks into place. It's deeply satisfying when a researcher experiences this click into place. But here's what most people miss about the funnel, is that you need to start up broader, often one level broader than your actual study. So, let me give you a concrete example. If you're doing a study on barriers to mental health access in Zimbabwe, that means your lit review cannot start in the middle of the funnel, down here. In the precision about your research question and the gap that you want to fill, it needs to start one level up. So, that could be in different starting points. And there's not often a one universally correct answer. It depends on who you're chatting to, who your audience is. In this case, on barriers to mental health access, it might be about the challenges around access to maternal health services globally. And then it might narrow down to the situation in a Sub-Saharan African context. And then it might look at common barriers that have been seen worldwide in recurring patterns and finally deliver and justify the need for, why do we need to study this so much? Why is this so important in Zimbabwe? The funnel here exists so that by the time you reach the end of your literature review, the gap and the reason for your study feels inevitable. Almost think of it like a lawyer, if you're marshalling evidence and building a case for why your study needs to happen. Now, when I'm talking about the gap, we actually have a full dedicated training on the gap you might want to check out. There are different kinds of gaps that are out there, but basically the idea of the gap is that there's some missingness in the field, something that hasn't been done that needs to be done. And so, you're kind of bringing your field right up to the edge, the forefront of the literature, getting that edge case of what do we know, but don't yet know? Or what's weak and hasn't sufficiently answered the core research questions that we need to overcome and do better than. And that's really the gap. And it's almost like saying, well, the field got us to here, but we need to get to here and that difference, that space, that is the gap. And so, that is the precision and the clarity that you need to get to at the end of this funnel. Quick interruption to today's video from our sponsor. Mate, if you want to work with a real person and not AI, I would encourage you to check out our elite mentorship and support programs where we work directly together in a one-to-one capacity to help you develop a personalized plan that's going to get you from where you are to defining a winning topic all the way through to successful publication. We go so far as to offer a publication guarantee that if you show up, you do the work, we don't do it for you, that would be unethical, just like AI doing it for you is unethical and just not a good idea. We work together each step of the way, so you never feel lost, you never feel stuck, so that you optimize your chances for success and we guarantee we're not going to leave you hanging if you show up and do the work, we are going to see you through to the finish line. That's a big ask, that's a big offer and no one we know of can match this level of commitment with the real results that our students have had. If you're interested, book a call with the link below and see if you could be a good fit for us working together in an intimate way. Now, let me turn to a common mistake that I see researchers do in the middle of the funnel as they're starting broad from the context, which is about why is this area so important as they're trying to get down and derive and justify their gap and ultimately their research question. Because the middle of the funnel is where students often quietly go wrong and it's here that you need to start synthesizing this evidence and getting really into the details of papers and the research that's been done before. And you can imagine the most boring literature review that's just descriptive is just saying author X said this, author Y said this. And I see this in a lot of literature reviews, a paragraph that just said the author says this, author X found that. And what you really need instead to do in describing this evidence is you need to before even writing it, you can write to figure things out. That is a strategy, just be willing to discard everything, is you need to start analyzing and scrutinizing your evidence to figure out this missingness. So you need to find agreements, contradictions, weak methods, blind spots. And ultimately, you'll hope that patterns start to emerge. For example, in the Zimbabwe case I just mentioned, maybe someone says, well, in South Africa, they found these barriers, but it hasn't been looked at in Zimbabwe. Or maybe the problem is Zimbabwe has one of the worst situations of access in the world, but hasn't been studied. And so it's an important tracer case to see if the world is making progress on access to maternal health care. I'm just making something up. But that's the kind of a narrative you need to get to. And you don't get there by saying, author found this, author said that. What you need to do is consistently start following this formula, what we call a did plus found formula, and weave the studies that you're looking at into a structure. And so the goal here is you need to start synthesizing. And this is going to happen first by taking all the studies that are going to be in your literature review, that core evidence of what's been done before that has to be there. And you need to be able to answer, what did the study do? And what did it find? This is our did plus found formula. So you don't want in the middle of your funnel to, in a very boring way, summarize like this. The authors looked at barriers in South Africa and found price was one of the major limiting factors. That's okay, but you need to synthesize. So you need to build and get into what the studies did and what they found. The correct, more appropriate way to describe this here would be actually to get granular with the evidence. So this would instead read something like, the authors tracked 169 pregnant mothers from 2017 to 2023 in Ethiopia. And they evaluated multiple potential determinants using logistic regression models to identify barriers to access. In their analysis, they found price was the major barrier that those who had low income were more than twofold more likely to forego access to care. What this does is bringing you to the edge of evidence so that you can later help trace out what the limitations were and again justify your gap. The key rule you need to pay attention to in this stage is that if something that you're summarizing is not moving you closer to your gap, if it's not kind of having this range of motion in the funnel to narrowing and pointing that direction, it doesn't belong. No matter how interesting it is, those details distract from your good stuff. And I do see a lot of researchers just getting bogged down, feel like they're drowning and overwhelmed in papers and details. And this brings me to my next point. Because once you know where the literature review is going to end, and you know this direction of travel and this funnel, it becomes much harder to get lost. So what are the two common mistakes I see now that you understand the funnel, they're going to become quite obvious. The first big problem I find is someone says to me, I can't find enough studies. There's just not enough studies on my topic. Well, that's probably because you didn't follow our first tip of going back up, going broader, going up a level. When you start narrow, often times I see people start their literature review at the point of maybe their empirical papers. And you're doing that paper often because there haven't been papers written in that very specific narrow gap that you're trying to fill. So you have to go broader. The second big challenge is the opposite part of this, where researchers say I'm drowning in papers. There's just so much there. I can't, I'm losing the forest through the trees. And what's happening is your funnel doesn't have this narrowing shape. It has kind of like a straight, like a pencil shape or tree trunk shape. And it's not narrowing. And so you're going in circles and you're not deriving, you're not synthesizing, you're not getting to your gap. So this, the starving for papers and drowning in too many papers, while they seem like opposites, they really trace from the same problem of this core underlying missing structure. Listen, if you've ever felt lost in your lit review, it doesn't mean that you're bad at research. It means no one gave you the right mental model. And inside FastTrack, that's one of the first things that we fix. So you have clarity from day one, because I hope you'll see and implement this right away. Once you get that funnel clear, the writing, the analysis, and confidence all follow. If you're looking for real, genuine help and support, I'd encourage you to click the link below, see if we're a good fit to work together. And I definitely encourage you to see this video that goes through our strip method and how we structure and saturate to complete lit reviews fast without AI. See you in the next video.