Dissertation Literature Review First Aid
“Save my literature review!”
Not feeling great about your dissertation literature review?
Maybe you’ve done a fair amount of work on it. Maybe you’ve read a little, or a lot. Maybe you’ve written up some, all or none of it.
However far along you are, you’ve just got this uncomfortable feeling about it.
If I asked you to summarise the three key things you’ve discovered through your review of the literature, or to tell me exactly where your research question sits in relation to the existing literature, you might be a bit, well … quiet!
Don’t worry, that’s absolutely fine. Many, many students submit their dissertation still feeling yuck about their literature review. You won’t, because you’re reading this blogpost, in which I’m going to teach you a simple process to supercharge your literature review using these five key questions:
1) What do I need the literature to tell me?
2) How can I organise this?
3) What have I already got?
4) Where are the gaps?
5) How should I structure my literature review now?
(1) What do I need the literature to tell me?
Grab a pen and piece of paper and write your dissertation title or question at the top.
Now, without looking at anything else - focus intently on that title or question - say to yourself, “Okay, I’m doing my study on this, what do I need the literature to tell me?”. Just off the top of your head. No need to Google anything, no need to run to the library (you can do that later), just spend some time thinking and brainstorming.
Look at the nouns – the words that represent people, places or things - and start asking some questions around them.
Let’s take a look at an example.
Say your dissertation title question is, “To what extent are parent and baby groups accessible to refugees living in East London?”.
Let’s start by highlighting our nouns. Parent and baby groups. Refugees. East London.
What might we want to find out from the literature before we start a study on this? Here are some questions I noted down:
What are parent and baby groups?
What happens at parent and baby groups?
Where are parent and baby groups held?
Who organises parent and baby groups?
Do you have to pay to go them?
What are the benefits of them?
What are the challenges or disadvantages of them?
What is a ‘refugee’?
How is this different from other terms that might be linked to this, like ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘migrant’?
How many refugees are there in East London?
Where are they from?
How many have young families?
What general challenges to do they face in East London?
What specific challenges do they face in their role as parents?
What support is available for them?
Who provides support for them? Government, local authorities, charities, businesses?
Is the support meeting their parenting needs?
Do this for your dissertation title or question. It should take you around 15-30 minutes and you will end up with a long list of questions, which is great.
(2) How can I organise this?
The second thing you need to go is organise these questions into a sensible order.
Come up with between three and five themes you can group them into.
Imagine that each question is a brick, and a theme is a wall. Build yourself three to five walls and give each wall a name. These names don’t have to be lovely and succinct and perfectly worded, they can be as messy as you like. Here are mine:
Describing parent and baby groups in general, identifying benefits and challenges.
Refugees in the UK in general and in East London specifically: who are they and what challenges do they face?
Support for refugees who have babies: what’s available in general and in East London specifically? Is it meeting their needs?
You might find that whilst you’re creating the themes, you’ll come up with new questions, which is absolutely fine, you can go back and forth as you get clearer.
Once you’ve got names for your themes, create a table with each name as the heading of a column, like this.
(3) What have I already got?
Now you have your table, what do you do with it?
It’s time to go back to your literature review and take a look at what you’ve already got.
Spend some time having a look through what you’ve already noted down. If you have a draft literature review, use that. If you’ve made some notes about items you’ve read, take a look through them. Just get your head back into your literature review, however brief or lengthy or all over the place it is.
What you’re going to do now is figure out which pieces of literature you already have fit underneath these new themes you’ve developed. Sort them into columns like this - just put the short form reference in the appropriate column, that’s perfectly fine. It doesn’t matter if one source goes into more than one column.
(4) Identify the gaps
It’s time to identify where your literature review gaps are now. Look at your table.
Are there some columns where you’re thinking, “Yeah, I’ve done a good job there, great”?
Are there other columns that are a bit – or totally - empty?
Are most of your columns a bit sparsely populated?
Whatever you can see, it’s totally fine, because now, you can start filling in those gaps by searching for more literature!
Jump onto Google Scholar and start typing in some search terms to discover academic literature that covers the areas that you want to develop further. Take a look at this blogpost if you need help with that.
(5) How should I structure my literature review now?
I want to draw your attention to something else that this process we’ve gone through might help you with. The structure of your literature review. After you’ve found all this new literature, and critically analysed it (check out this blogpost for more help with this), how do you get all this new material into your actual literature review?
Well, you know those themes you came up with earlier? You can use them as headings!
This can be really helpful if you haven’t started writing up yet and you’re a bit stuck on where to begin. Write out those themes as headings, with the questions that relate to them underneath, and begin answering the questions. You’ll find that you are merrily tapping away on your computer in no time, and that writing block – it’s gone. Hurrah!
It can also be helpful for those of you who have started writing up but you keep getting stuck and you’re not sure where to put particular things. If you’re jumping all over the place in your literature review, or if your supervisor has said, “Your structure needs improvement”, you can use the themes to help get things into a more logical order. Cross check the sections or headings in your draft with the themes and the questions you’ve developed. You might find you’ve covered some of them with what you’ve already got, and answered all the questions. Great, you can tick those off! You might find some of them are missing – so add them in, and tackle the questions underneath them.
Next steps!
No matter how much – or how little – work you’ve done on your literature review, I hope this blogpost is going to help you move forwards and get rid of that annoying feeling you had about it!
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