How Long Does It Take Ot Write a Literature Review

How Do Y'all Write a Literature Review, If No I Teaches You?

I sat across from my professor in silence for a minute before he spoke.

I was too embarrassed to wait at him and I but think a few phrases from the conversation such every bit:

"I idea you had something betwixt your ears", and

"I usually don't give people a second chance, just…"

Previously, when I had performed poorly in a class I e'er knew what I would have done differently if I could start over.

I would have started the assignments earlier, sought help from teaching administration, or done more exercise tests.

This class was entirely unlike. There were no exams. Nosotros had no educational activity assistants.

We were graded on an oral presentation (easy) and a term paper based on a literature review of 200+ papers (ugh!).

Equally a first year graduate student, the nigh complex papers I had ever written were 15-20 pages long, and they never had more than 10 references.

I had no clue where to begin, so I did what I was best at: sitting at my desk for hours reading.

It's fair to say that I worked at to the lowest degree twenty hours a week on this paper for 2 months directly.

After 160 hours of reading over 200 papers, I handed in a 20 folio paper and I was not proud of it.

I knew my professor was not happy either when I got an email that he wanted to come across me right away.

At to the lowest degree he gave me a second chance. It was ii weeks before the end of the semester and he said:

"Just write a more coherent paper based on the fifty-100 most important references, and I will give you a B. Your oral presentation was good, and then I will consider that."

I took his advice and he gave me a B.

In retrospect, I know that I could have written a more thorough newspaper and gotten an A.

Once you take a well-structured review of 50 papers, adding another 50-100 references is straightforward.

A cutting-edge literature is well within your adequacy – and it is not as complex or time-consuming as you might think.

There Is a Process

Fast forward 5 years to my first week equally a postdoctoral fellow.

My supervisor had just been asked to write chapter for a book and, as I had no project withal, I was asked whether I would like to have the opportunity to write this chapter.

How could I say "No" to my new boss?

I already had one published literature review paper nether my belt from graduate school, and even though this topic was non related to my thesis, I decided to take the opportunity.

Five months afterwards (a week before the due engagement for the book affiliate) I handed in a final re-create to my supervisor. I still remember the pleasantly surprised look on his confront when he said:

"Wow, I think you are the first person in the history of this volume publisher, who handed in their  chapter past the borderline."

Apparently, I was not the simply one who had struggled in the past with literature reviews.

While my first experience with a literature review was humiliating, it taught me a very important lesson about writing: start simple, and get fancy later.

Every bit a senior graduate student and a postdoc, I didn't start out by reading and trying to absorb 200+ references earlier writing.

I already knew that it was more important to have a structure than a long list of references.

By then, I had also adult a writing procedure, and so I was able to minimize author's cake. Notation that I wrote minimize, not eliminate, writer'south block.

Author's cake is like the mutual cold – information technology is ever around you and you lot accept to actively take activity to foreclose information technology from infecting you.

Everyone has a slightly different manifestation of author's block:

• Internet surfing/social media/email when y'all know you should be writing,
• Reading for hours because y'all never feel fix to write,
• Doing chores around the house even though they are not urgent,
• Helping others considering you feel too stuck to work on your ain projection, or
• Socializing or going to the movies, because y'all feel too overwhelmed to work on your paper.

I was guilty of all of the to a higher place to some extent while writing my papers and my thesis.

At that place is no shame in having author's block. Every writer has it. Every 24-hour interval.

The only departure between writing my outset literature review for my grade and my book chapter five years later on was that I recognized when I had author's block and I knew how to deal with.

3 Steps To an Outstanding Literature Review

I had a very unproblematic writing procedure in college for my xx page term papers.

Afterwards reading five-10 references, I sat down and wrote the whole paper in two days and, when I did not oversleep the solar day it was due, I proofread information technology speedily right before handing it in.

This procedure did not work for academic review articles that had to survey the unabridged literature.

I had to develop a new system to collect hundreds of papers and clarify them in one succinct literature review.

Step i: Prepare up a structure for your paper

In retrospect, I believe that the main reason I struggled with my kickoff newspaper was that the sections were not defined clearly.

I blindly buried myself in the literature reading without a well-defined purpose for months.

Years later when I had to write my book chapter, I spent several days setting up an outline. Information technology was a chip of work upfront, but the payoff was well worth information technology.

One time you have a structure for your manuscript, you can read papers more efficiently.

You lot volition no longer be reviewing 100 papers for your literature review, only but ten papers for Section ane, and 10 papers for Section 2 etc. Doesn't that sound more doable?

At the terminate of this pace your outline should include all the major sections and most of the subsections likewise.

Remember, you are not married to your outline.

It can, and it volition take chances. That's okay. Every bit long every bit you are synthesizing the literature and answering relevant questions, yous are making progress.

All the pieces will fall into the right place if you lot keep writing.

Step 2: Develop a timeline with specific milestones for each section

Now you accept your outline, and it probably feels keen. I know that one of the turning points for me in graduate school occurred when I finally had a vision of my table of contents.

It was liberating to have a department to put each bucket of data into.

Even so, your paper will not write itself. A literature review can have anywhere from 2-6 months depending on how many hours a twenty-four hour period you work on it.

As humans we don't have a good sense of time, and even after years of experience we ever overestimate how much we can do.

Information technology just feels good to imagine that the literature review will be completed in ii months, right?

Since our sense of time is skewed, we commonly exit things to the terminal minute (or terminal few days) at the expense of the quality of our work.

If you desire to write a high quality manuscript, a timeline with specific milestones is essential.

Once you lot accept the construction, gear up a due appointment for each department.

Having a date written downward, volition help you to stay on track for each section and reduce the overwhelm.

Be mindful that virtually no one follows their timeline exactly. Life happens.

Thus, you will probably need to adjust your timeline weekly, or fifty-fifty daily every bit y'all go closer to your deadline.

Stride three: Elaborate your newspaper through each stage of writing

One of the biggest sources of frustration is that students expect a polished document to menstruation from their head and to the paper. This never happens.

Ideas are not formed completely in your brain.

You lot have an incoherent mix of thoughts in your mind, and they will come up out incoherently the first time. This scares students and they automatically assume that they are not good writers.

I used to assume that I was a poor writer every bit well, and I blamed it on not being an native English language speaker.

Notwithstanding, once I realized that prolific authors (many of whom are also not native speakers) had messy first drafts and fought writer's block on a daily basis, I felt relieved.

I realized that writing went through stages, and y'all take to get through each phase to take a manuscript that is rich in content and well-structured.

Cypher draft:This is the idea collection phase. In this stage your ideas do not have to come out coherently. Y'all are merely trying to get as many ideas on newspaper as y'all can.

First draft:The first draft is a coherent, merely not perfect, document. There is a logical period to your arguments, only at that place may be a few gaps hither and at that place.

This version needs to be ready to be handed in to your supervisor for a review then y'all tin make whatsoever necessary changes before sending it off to your thesis committee.

Second/Final draft:Your second or concluding draft should be a complete manuscript that is ready to be handed in to your thesis committee and is

1) is coherent,

2) gratuitous of spelling and grammatical errors,

3) complete with references, table of contents, appendix, tables and figures, and

4) properly formatted.

Most your committee will ask yous to make modifications to this version, only if yous don't take to change the central structure you can go through their recommendations by editing ane section at a fourth dimension.

It is astonishing how much simpler life becomes once you structure your paper and you pause down the writing process into distinct stages.

Not only will this process salve y'all fourth dimension, but it will besides help yous to write better and incorporate changes from your supervisor and thesis committee equally you get  through each section.

Think that no is built-in knowing how to write a literature review.

The articles yous read in journals started out as messy drafts, and went through many stages of editing by several experts in the field before they were ready to exist published.

Your literature review does not take to be perfect as you lot write it (no one's is). Your chore is to show up every twenty-four hour period and keep writing.

If you have a well-divers structure and realistic milestones,  yous will make steady progress and create a literature review that you volition be proud of.

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Source: https://finishyourthesis.com/literature-review/

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