Literature Review Tips
Charlotte's friendly tips for how to write a Lit Review. They're neither as lame nor as difficult as you think!
Finding Papers
In order to find work that's relevant to the topic you're interested in, you can use a few different methods:
The bibliography of the paper you're currently reading
Other work by the authors of the paper you're reading
Organizing your findings
First thing, you should get citation management software! It will improve your life immediately and dramatically. I recommend, in order of how much I like them:
Zotero (this one has not steered me wrong yet)
Mendeley (good for collaborative bibliography creation)
There are other ones but they aren't free or I don't know how they work at Duke
A citation manager will allow you to keep all your downloaded articles organized, will automatically generate a bibliography for you, and even combines with Microsoft Word to make it easier to cite work in papers. Good citation management is crucial to both your success and your sanity. Start now!
Next, you need to do something to protect yourself against forgetting everything you read. Everyone forgets some things, especially when reading a lot of similar papers in a short period of time. To make sure you don't lose information you'll need later, it's best to write short summaries of papers while you read them, or as soon as you're done, in a spreadsheet like this. This will:
prevent you from forgetting where you found things
help you highlight the important findings in a paper
expose holes that exist in the literature (or in your review of it)
allow you to sort your findings by participant age or any other metric you could want.
The provided spreadsheet is merely a template. Each literature search has unique demands, so make sure you customize to suit your needs.
Other misc tips:
Keep an eye out for keywords or specialized jargon in common between the papers you read-- this will help you find more potentially relevant work by giving you search terms for Google Scholar and other online databases!
After each paper, record 3-5 questions that you're left with after reading-- and try looking to see if anyone has done the work to answer them
Carefully consider papers with conflicting findings. Are there methodological issues that could explain the differences? Do confounding factors differ? Is there a principled reason the subjects may behave differently in one study vs. another?
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