How to Write a Good STEM Lit Review without Losing Your Sanity: A 5-step(ish) Guide for the Modern “Work Smart, Not Hard” Graduate Student

Photo by Karl Solano on Unsplash

by Grace Aquino, Consultant

The age-old aphorism, “publish or perish,” rings particularly loudly for graduate students in STEM. As soon-to-be Ph.D.’s, M.S.’s, and experts in our subject matter, the pressure to publish impactful papers that advance both our field of study and our career as independent researchers can be overwhelming at times, especially since we receive little to no guidance on how to write scientific papers, let alone impactful ones. (To learn more about how to write scientific papers, read “Scientific Writing: How to Write Papers that Get Cited and Proposals that Get Funded” by Joshua Schimel!) One such type of impactful paper and the cornerstone of a good dissertation is the literature review. What is a lit review? Besides being the one paper you repeatedly quote to make yourself sound smart, a lit review is a paper that systematically evaluates dozens if not hundreds of published peer-reviewed papers on a defined topic or question, and then summarizes them in a useful way to synthesize new information, identify new problems and questions/knowledge gaps, and ultimately offer new insights and areas of research for the wider scientific community to learn from and address. In fact, we’ve all stumbled across the one or two lit reviews in our field that not only have enlightened us on a subject but have also revolutionized how we think of a problem and/or springboarded us into research action. While reading a good lit review can be academically catalyzing, writing one, on the other hand, can be academically soul crushing. With the right tools, however, it doesn’t have to be!

This blogpost is a 5-step(ish) guide on how to write a good STEM lit review without losing your sanity, designed specifically for the modern “work smart, not hard” graduate student, like you.

 

Step 1. Define the research topic and identify the central question(s) you’re asking.

Before you even start searching for papers to evaluate in your lit review, you need to define your research topic and identify the central question(s) you’re asking. Specifically, your research topic should be the “big picture” problem or need in your field, and the question(s) you choose should be narrow enough to be answered (at least in part) by evaluating the existing body of literature on said topic. For example, if your research topic is evaluating the psychosocial effects that COVID-19 has on a certain group of people, your central questions might be: how does/did the COVID-19 pandemic affect grad students’ mental health and general outlook on post-graduate life? If your research topic is more methods-flavored, like improving protocols for extracting COVID-19 viral particles from different environmental matrices, your question(s) might be: what methods currently exist to extract viral RNA from waste-water samples and what are their advantages/disadvantages? The types of questions you can ask are infinite. But remember to choose a question that is large enough in scope to move the field forward but small enough in scope that you can answer it given limited resources (like time, available peer-reviewed papers, and coffee).

 

Step 2. Search for relevant literature and make a list.

What is relevant literature? What is irrelevant literature? And where do you even begin to search for it? Deciding these things can be tricky, which is why the first thing you’ll need is a predetermined list of keywords related to the research topic and/or question, and clear selection (i.e. inclusion) criteria. To use the same example as before, if your topic is on the psychosocial effects of COVID-19 on grad student mental health, you might use all of these words as keywords and then include a few more tangentially related or synonymous ones to ensure your search is broad enough (like “college student”, “psychological effects,” “social effect,” “stress,” “quality of life” and “COVID19 pandemic”).  Don’t forget to use the Boolean operators “and,” “or,” and “not” in your search.

The second thing you’ll need is your university’s and/or public scholarly search engines to help you find papers. Baylor University Libraries’ One Search is a good place to start (especially since you have access to most if not all scholarly articles via the university’s academic journal subscriptions and interlibrary loans) but you’re not limited to this search engine. There are other great search engines likes PubMed, PubChem, ScienceDirect, ResearchGate, Springerlink, JSTOR, Web of Science, PLUS ONE, Scopus, Google Scholar, and the list goes on. (For a comprehensive list, see Top 100 Best Websites to Find Academic Journals, Articles & Books – Quertime). One tool I’ve found useful for finding related papers and staying abreast with my academic reading in general is the online visualization tool, Connected Papers. This impressive mapping tool gives you a visual overview of the literatures in the academic field you’re interested in, based on keywords you input, and it shows connections between new relevant papers and prior and/or derivative works.  I highly recommend it!

Finally, don’t let your initial shock at the overwhelming or underwhelming number of papers that your search returns deter you. Instead, use your clearly-defined selection criteria (e.g. papers no older than X amount of years, studies including both male and female participants, clinical and/or nonclinical studies, etc.)  to choose the papers you will evaluate and then store them in your preferred reference manager (EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, etc.). Read the abstracts of the paper and look through their reference section, which oftentimes is a goldmine of references. Add papers to your list that pass your initial criteria check; you can always come back and edit this list after reading through the abstracts. Your list may be long or short, depending on the abundance of papers that match your criteria and/or addressing your research topic. If your research topic is fairly new, you may not find many papers (but hey, that’s less reading for you and more opportunity to make a significant contribution!). Nonetheless, the selection criteria is important for your review to be considered systematic, so make sure you take the time to decide what the selection criteria are before you start your search.

 

Step 3. Read the papers to answer your central question and keep an annotated bibliography!

Shockingly, yes, you’ll have to actually read the papers you chose for your lit review. But you don’t actually have to read them in their entirety (unless you’re OCD like me). Since you’ll have read the abstracts at this point, focus on reading the papers in a given order (chronological, alphabetic, or another reasonable order) and smartly – i.e. to answer your central question. Be sure to keep good notes on the themes, knowledge gaps, debates, problematic findings, new insights, etc. that you discover as you read. Don’t underestimate the power of the annotated bibliography. For each paper you read, keep an annotated bibliography with these notes, which will significantly increase your ability to organize your lit review later and significantly decrease the crippling anxiety that comes from disorganized lit review processes. One tip to expedite the reading process is to briefly skim the introduction, skip the methods (unless your central question is about the methods), and spend a designated amount of time on the results and discussion sections, which are where you’ll likely find the answer your central question. If you find yourself spending an ungodly amount of time reading a single paper, use a productivity tool (like the Pomodoro technique) to help keep yourself on track. You can always come back to a paper if you need to clarify something later, but remember, you want to maximize your productivity from the beginning by finding ways to read and note-take more efficiently so that you can get to the meat of the lit review, the writing, sooner rather than later.

 

Step 4. Write an outline.

Based on your reading and notes, decide what lit review structure works best to write in light of the central question you’re asking. Use the central question explicitly as your thesis statement at the end of your introduction, after you’ve described the background of the “big picture” problem you’re addressing and highlighted the specific knowledge gap(s) in your field of research that further warrant your lit review. For the body of the lit review, the four main lit review structures typically used are:

  • Chronological – This is the simplest approach to map the development of your topic over time. If you choose this approach, avoid simply summarizing papers or listing them in order. Instead, focus on analyzing patters, key events, important debates or opposing views, etc. that have shaped the field and/or address the central question.
  • Thematic – This strategy uses recurring themes to organize your lit review into subsections that address different areas of the topic. For example, if you’re evaluating the psychosocial effects of COVID19 on graduate students, you might have several psychosocial parameters you’re evaluating, so you can use each of these as thematic sub-headers throughout the paper.
  • Methodological – If you’re comparing research methods from different fields or disciplines, you can use this approach to group similar methods together and juxtapose different ones. You can also discuss advantages and disadvantages of the methods in this strategy.
  • Theoretical – Oftentimes, the lit review is the foundation for a theoretical framework. This strategy allows you to discuss existing/new theories, definitions and key concepts, test models, etc. Like the methodological strategy, you can discuss the relevance of one theoretical approach over another, advantages, disadvantages, etc.

End the outline of your lit review with the conclusion/future direction section, where you will highlight the most important insights you’ve learned and offer new questions for the wider scientific community to address.

This outlining step is perhaps one of the hardest aspects of the lit review because putting an effective outline together can feel much like putting together a blank puzzle. However, once you’ve decided which outline structure works best for your topic and you’ve written out the outline, writing the paper will be easier (not easy!) than writing without a strategy in mind.

 

Step 5. Write the lit review.

There’s not much explanation needed here. For more help on writing the specific parts of the lit review, visit Scribbr’s “What is a Lit Review: Step-by-Step Guide and Examples”.

Consider joining a writing group to keep yourself accountable and writing routinely (and sane!). The GWC starts new ones every semester. Look out for our email! Remember, writing IS thinking, and writing CREATES knowledge, so make sure you give yourself time everyday to sit down and write something.

 

Step 5.5. Revise and edit, and send it to the GWC!

Once your first draft is done, have someone you trust in your professional circle review it and offer constructive criticism. Additionally, the GWC is always happy to help! You can send you papers direct to gwc@baylor.edu and we will pair you with a consultant to serve as an outside expert reader and offer feedback over a brief meeting.

If you’re writing the lit review for your dissertation or thesis, be sure to incorporate it following the guidelines and requirements given by your advisor/program. If you’re writing the lit review as a stand-alone paper or as part of a manuscript for an academic journal, follow the journal’s stylistic formatting and requirements, and ensure your citations are correct.

 

While writing a lit review can induce high levels of academic anxiety, we hope that this guide helps demystify the process and put some of that anxiety to rest. Remember that you are capable and that there are people here to help you! Email us at gwc@baylor.edu for help with your lit review (or any other paper) at any stage of completion.

Writing the Literature Review: The QuiltWork Method

Photo by Dinh Pham on Unsplash

by Kristin Huggins, Consultant

It is highly unusual to meet someone in academia, be it a student or professor, who genuinely enjoys the prospect of writing a literature review. Thesis, dissertation, journal article, program assessment – the medium matters not. The quintessential literature review has a singular way of unifying individuals across all disciplines and all levels of research. Someone whispers its name into the bleak unknown. All hold their breath in response, hoping it will pass over their doorstep like an academic Angel of Death.

Despite your feelings on the subject, all graduate students must write an exhaustive, cohesive literature review at some point in their academic careers. While daunting, this task need not be completed at the expense of blood, sweat, and tears. Finding an effective writing method can easily reduce your writing workload (and subsequent anxiety) from an Everest into a molehill. Or several molehills, in this case.

 

Enter the QuiltWork Writing Method.

The QuiltWork Method was born as an act of desperation while deep in the throes of writing my first dissertation draft. With deadlines looming and candidacy standing in the shadows of the doctoral guillotine, I knew that a linear approach to writing my literature review wouldn’t get me there fast enough. My topics were too broad, my sources too interdisciplinary – I found myself missing key points in articles that had already been “assigned” to other sections of my review. I was trying to create a blanket with one fell swoop, by synthesizing all of the scholarship of my topic at once. And it wasn’t working. I needed to instead step back and approach the literature review the same way my grandmother approached her sewing projects: one square bit of fabric at a time.

So I stopped. I saved my work. And started from scratch. Here was what I tried instead:

Step One: Write an Outline. It doesn’t matter if you rewrite this ten times over. Get an outline on the page. What are the main sections of your literature review? Are you following a narrative model (broad to narrow topics) or a systematic model (individual topics that together form a cohesive argument for your study)? Start there. Every project, no matter how small or large, needs a vision (or a Pinterest board).

Step Two: Prepare your Word Documents. Open a series of blank Word or Google documents. The number you open should match the number of literature review sections you outlined in Step One. If you are working on a small laptop, you may also consider keeping them minimized until needed to maximize screen efficiency. Do not include your Introduction or Conclusion, since these will be written once you’ve completed your Literature Review.

Step Three: One Source at a Time. Unlike a traditional linear writing process, you are no longer trying to spin paragraphs out of thin air. With QuiltWork writing, you go through each source one by one and read for key points and quotes. As you come across these points in your reading, open up the word doc that represents that literature review section and write. How is this relevant to your study? What does this remind you of? Do you need this quote? Be sure to include the full citation at the top of the blurb before you begin, and place in-text citations throughout. This will alleviate many headaches later when you patch these quilting squares together.

***Note for Step Three: If Source #1 has a point that works for Section A and Section D, place it in both! Isn’t the purpose of a literature review to provide an exhaustive, synthesized perspective of the existing scholarship? This method encourages this idea of scholarly flexibility, acknowledging that one source can be used in many different ways if given the right lens. Many times, I found that one source possessed data that could be applied to nearly every section in my literature review!

Step Four: Rinse, Wash, Repeat. Continue to repeat Step Three with every source you have. That’s right – every single one. Eventually, you’ll begin to make connections. Your documents might take on a note of free flow synthesis without you even realizing it.

Step Five: The Inquiry. Once you have worked through a large portion of your sources, I would recommend going back through each document and asking these questions: Which ones are filled to the brim with pages and pages of content? Which ones are still lagging behind? Do you need to shift your focus and feed the smaller ones with new sources? How many quotes have you found for each section? Do you need more? Less? Have you included citations for all of your work? Go back and check each one before moving on. These questions will guide you as you begin to refine your sections into veritable reservoirs of empirical evidence to support your study.

Step Six: The Great Gathering. You now should have 3-5 documents filled with quality content. At this point, you may see themes emerge in these documents. Identify the themes and work to craft stellar topic sentences out of them. These topic sentences are the seams that will bind the writing you’ve already accomplished.

 

At this point, you will find yourself edging closer and closer to writing a traditional paragraph. After you’ve completed Step Six, take the leap! You now have a clear idea of what you want to say in each section, which sources are key contenders in these debates, and how you plan to synthesize these works across the various sections of your literature review. You may now commence with sewing your quilting squares together to form the Great Blanket.

I do not profess to be a great seamstress, nor do I consider myself a great writer. But this small writing hack, created out of desperation and fear, allowed my brain to finally put words on the page. And as many of you know, getting words on the page is perhaps the biggest challenge of all.

You can do this. You can write this. How do we quilt a blanket? One square at a time.

Happy writing to you all!