Give Me Your Lit Review Secrets

It's rainy and you're on your way to the gas station to fill up your car. You secretly want to get away from writing, maybe even get tacos. “Pssst.” It's me. In a trenchcoat. Holding a folder that says “confidential” on it. You open it:

Here's some secrets about literature reviews that you learn from doing tons of them.

Your literature review is more about what the literature says than what your research question is. If you're reading to answer the question “why is water blue?” you'll quickly learn that water is almost never just blue and the color can be changed by many different pollutants or contaminants. Create a barrier around the literature at the beginning so your scope doesn't balloon and step off into a deep dive of human health when you were researching hydrochemistry.

Only read papers that are valuable to what you're studying. This is deeper than the topic of the paper. Take time to screen papers by title, then abstract, then full-text. If a paper is excluded from your literature review because the abstract didn't contain any mention of the method or system you're studying, note that and move on to papers that are more closely on your research focus.

Decide what you're going to save from articles. From hundreds of interviews, researchers most often save key quotes, figures, and tables from articles they deem important to reference later. We built FoundThat around that workflow to keep you in control of what you've read and plan to use in writing.

This last one is weird but works. After making a simple outline, write the narrative to your paper once without your notes, or even with your eyes closed. This will tell you which articles you read that you remember the most, and which ones you'll need to re-read. After writing the first draft, go to where you've kept your notes and search through your key quotes to remind yourself why you included each article and select quotes that you'll cite in your paper. Scan through your figures and tables to see what else should be dropped into your paper.

• Write down anything significant that may relate to your topic, especially from papers in other fields. They may have another way of doing what you're doing.
• Get a citation manager. These things will do in-line citations and bibliographies, auto-generated with incredible accuracy.
• Add all quotes, data, figures, etc. to your rough draft before you ever write anything. With proper citations done ahead of time, you're just writing to connect and elaborate on the key quotes.
• Speed up your data extraction. If you're doing a systematic review, you may already know about some tools for this. FoundThat can work for both and keep things simple: from paper screening and identifying the key quotes all the way to pulling out tables.
• Ask peers, faculty, and others to read over what you have to make sure it all moves toward a single purpose and makes grammatical sense. Tools like Grammarly can do the second step.