How to Write A Literature Review: My 5 step process to easily writing literature reviews quickly

How to Write a Literature Review

In this video, the speaker provides a simple process for writing a literature review. The first step is to find a relevant topic that has about 6-12 strong papers in it. Then, you can use tools like Google Scholar or illicit.org to find research articles.

Finding Your Literature Review Topic

• Choose a topic that is highly relevant to your research project.

• Avoid going too broad with your topic.

• Look for topics that have about 6-12 strong papers in them.

Finding Research Articles

• Use tools like Google Scholar or illicit.org to find research articles.

• Sort the search results by relevancy and look for titles that belong in your specific topic.

• Illicit.org uses GPT3 model to find actual papers and produce summaries.

Writing Your Literature Review

• Start by reading all of the articles you found and taking notes on each one.

• Organize your notes into categories based on themes or topics.

• Write an introduction that explains why the topic is important and what questions you will be answering in your review.

• Write the body of your review, organizing it by theme or topic and summarizing each article's findings within those themes/topics.

• End with a conclusion that summarizes the main findings of your review and discusses their implications for future research.

Tips for Writing a Successful Literature Review

• Be concise and clear in your writing.

• Use subheadings to organize your review.

• Avoid plagiarism by properly citing all sources.

• Get feedback from others on your review before submitting it for publication.

Finding and Organizing Research Papers

In this section, the speaker discusses how to find relevant research papers and organize them for a literature review.

Finding Relevant Research Papers

• Don't try to find every single paper that could be relevant to your topic.

• Focus on creating a strong story from all the individual papers.

• Use tools like Research Rabbit to find any connected papers you may have missed.

Organizing Research Papers

• Organize your research papers chronologically or thematically.

• For a systematic review, use specific inclusion and exclusion criteria.

• For a narrative review, organize thematically and then chronologically.

Summarizing Research Papers

• Once you have organized your themes, summarize the research articles under each theme.

• Identify why the field moved in a certain direction and what issues arose.

• Synthesize why the field went in a certain direction and what gaps still need to be addressed.

Steps to Writing a Literature Review

In this section, the speaker outlines the steps involved in writing a literature review.

Communicating Your Story

• Communicate your story verbally so that people understand.

• Don't need to know every single paper in your literature review.

• Synthesize what you learned from the lit review and how the field should move forward.

Writing Your Lit Review

• Write your lit review after communicating your story.

• Create a narrative lit review with an introduction, themes, and conclusion sections.

• Introduction: What are the things someone needs to know to understand my story?

• Themes: Walk through your story by discussing different themes.

• Conclusion: Main conclusions of the field up to this point and limitations still present.

Tools for Organizing Your Papers

• Use software like Zotero or Notion to organize research articles and create subheadings.

• Notion template available for organizing research articles (link provided in description).

Conclusion

• Summarize main conclusions of the field up to this point and limitations still present.

Importance of Biological Mixtures

In this section, the speaker emphasizes the need to start thinking about biological mixtures and running methods on actual biological samples to ensure that they work in a biological sense.

Key Points

• The speaker highlights the importance of testing methods on actual biological samples.

• When writing a literature review, it is important to find a concise literature review topic, find relevant articles, organize them, create and communicate your story from those articles, and finally write your lit review.

• The video provides links to different software that can be used for writing literature reviews.

• If you found this video helpful, please like and subscribe to the channel for more research tips on how to become an efficient researcher.