How to Write a Literature Review Without Going Crazy

Pull my hair out, pinch me, hit me with the book I'm supposed to be reading, but don't make me write about it. If this sounds like you, I've been there. What you need is more time, or a way to speed things up. Here's a quick guide on not losing your mind writing a literature review:

1. 1Get all the literature in one place so you're not asking “where'd I put that?” Tools like Zotero for reference management or FoundThat can both store papers. If you're doing it all manually, keep your file folders accurate at all times on your computer.
2. 2Make sure you have a reference manager so you're not learning citation format the day you need this finished. This deserves a second point because if you have no provenance, trying to find your papers and learn a new reference style will eat you alive on larger literature reviews.
3. 3Get quotes and data stored somewhere with the paper connected to it. This is where an extraction software like FoundThat is going to save your life. Even the free version has unlimited extraction for up to 20 papers. You can also do this with a manual copy/paste and DOI links back to the original paper. If doing it manually, get really comfortable with Google Docs or Microsoft Word as an annotated bibliography.
4. 4Knowing what's in the paper, and having it in your Word/Google doc, start writing about how the quotes and data connect to one another.
5. 5Polish everything using Grammarly: free is fine, but paid is well worth it.

If you want to take a literature review to the next level and add an extra layer of credibility to your work, check out our article "Writing a Reproducible and Replicable Literature Review".