Education (Postgraduates)

CQUniversity have created a 'Literature Review Tutorial' that outlines the various steps involved in undertaking a lit review. As well as describing the steps, they have short videoclips of researchers and academics discussing their perspective on each stage of the literature review process.  

"How to find the knowns and unknowns in any research" - this is one of The Conversation articles in the series 'Understanding Research'

The following documents are 'samples' - to give you worked examples of some of the steps involved in your literature review.

There is also an excellent guide, made available by the Leeds University Library on Documenting your search. It outlines some processes, and gives great examples and sample documents.

As you review books, journals and other literature, make a list of the keywords and search terms that you have used. It is often useful to list the terms that aren't useful or relevant, as well as the ones that are.

You may wish to create a mind map of all of the terms that apply to your topic before conducting your literature search. This mind map can then be used to guide your literature search, and ensure that you discuss pertinent concepts in the review itself.

This mind map and its sections can also be the subsections that you use for storing the results of your research.

Hint: Use the Groups function in EndNote to create sub-groups of your EndNote Library that match your literature review sections.

Many mind mapping tools are available on the web.