writing a literature review can be a really frustrating process it can take such a long time and it really doesn't need to be as stressful as it actually is if you're watching this video it's probably because you want some support on writing a lecture review and excellent literature review when you're short of time in today's video I'm going to be sharing the ways that I um was able to save time and able to write literature reviews really quickly which meant that I was able to get a first on all the literature reviews that I wrote
during University and these tips are specifically for the process of when you're researching and trying to find the literature to be able to use in your literature review how you read papers how you find that like critique those really important comparison points and then when you're writing and editing how you can kind of shave off a lot of hours of time um during those processes now the premise the whole premise of a lecture review is that you're looking at the literature within your field within your area of expertise and you are searching to understand what
the current state of knowledge is within your field and so and excellent literature review is only going to be one that has looked at all of the papers has exhausted the literature if you've missed out papers by Nature you are going to not have a complete literature review so my first tip that I always do is make sure that I have scoured the net to find every single paper that is important and that's going to have an impact on what I'm able to say in the literature review and there's a few ways that I do
that the first is that I always have a list of keywords that I'm going to be using to search always and I write those down and I stick to them so have 10 keywords that you use when you're doing your search you stick to the 10 keywords that you're looking at and only use those keywords you can use them in different orders so instead of using the same keywords in the same order mix them up when you're searching trust me it does bring up different papers you can also change the date range which you're looking
at so if you're someone in the stem field for example example I would highly recommend looking for papers that are more recent but if you're talking about the literature and trying to talk about the historical aspects of it and when things are first discovered or when the method was first used of course you need to look at the original paper look at the first paper so just be aware of the fact that you can modify the date ranges to make sure that you are actually speaking about the current state of literature and also be aware
of the difference between review papers so like primary research papers so when you're searching you can see that it will say things like review primary search paper review and you need to be aware that those are very different types of papers so when I was looking for papers I would always make sure that I'm looking for primary research papers initially review papers are also really good um but when you're referencing and you want to cite a paper within your literature review avoid referencing review papers because that's not the original paper and it looks like all
you've done is read a review paper and then copy what they've said and that's not how you get it first so just be aware of like the type of people that you're reading the date range and also making sure that you've stuck to a list of keywords keep searching for those keywords alone gather all the papers that you can and then give yourself a time limit for when for how long you're going to actually do this when you're reading the second tip is to always have a reading summary log it's one that's called a compare
and contrast framework and this is really helpful because it helps them to summarize different authors arguments and different kind of methods and results which moves you away from just writing descriptively and actually helps you think about it from a critique aspect so when you're reading your papers don't just read them and just think oh okay this is what they've done oh this is what they've done actually have a table that you're actively and this is the key thing it's the active reading um which is where the critique and where the kind of more in-depth understanding
comes from actively reading and taking the sources and taking the information taking the methods writing down the limitations compare having contrasting with what you previously read doing that actively as you're reading saves you hours and hours of time you don't have to go and read it for a second round and if you already have this table set up for you when you start to read all right the next thing is whilst you're writing I will always try to make sure that I don't edit and this is something that is really difficult but it's also something
that wastes a lot of time so as you're writing your review you're noticing errors you're noticing mistakes in your writing and then you say oh I need to go back and correct it and then it doesn't make sense and it's not clear and now you're all jumbled in your head and my number one tip is always do not edit as you write however I have discovered paper pal which is actually an AI tool that provides instant suggestions for language improvements whilst you write actually as you're writing paper pal can help you with your grammar punctuation
spelling style Tone It checks a technical side of your writing and even gives you topic based suggestions to help you with your chances of getting a first class or even getting published writing a publication and this is really cool because as you're writing um you can either use paper pal for the web version or you have paper pal for the word version which is a word plugin which I'll show you and it's super super cool as you can see here this is the paper power for the web version you simply just input Your Word file
or you can load your text directly onto it and you can see all of the suggestions that it's given me things like punctuation things like rephrasing because it doesn't quite make sense um things like what what kind of Articles I've used um things like capitalization uh noun number verb form even just changing the words so the choice of word is better and it could all do that as you're writing and then they have a word add-on which is also actually my favorite um feature of paper pal and it's specifically tailored for researchers and those that
are doing academic writing which is really important the kind of words end language that you'd be using as an academic and someone that's writing academic text is very different to those that don't and so it can accurately detect those words and any complex grammatical errors and correct it for you as you're writing and these extensive English language recommendations can really take your literature review from being you know a very simple mundane sounding bit of text to enhance it to make it sound more clear more academic and flow better which is really important as you know
when your examiner is reading your literature review you want to make sure that you sound like you know what you're talking about and you want to make sure that all the reading you've done has been put in a way that flows and makes sense and like I said this will save you so much time as you don't have to think about it you don't have to edit you just need to write your job is to do your writing and paper power will do the checking for you as well as the paper pal um on the
web real time and as well as the word version you also have the manuscript version so if you're someone who is emitting and manuscripts and for publishing to a journal you can also submit your manuscript on there and it will check for any technical issues and also any language issues on in the manuscript so you have a higher chance of getting it accepted which is amazing as you can see I am a huge fan of paper power I think it's such an amazing resource if you're someone that's writing a literature review even an essay a
dissertation a thesis a manuscript anyone that's writing any academic text have this running on the side of your word document and you can ensure that you've got yourself covered at every stage of your writing I'll leave a link for them down below um so you can go click there and start it and try it today for free now my fourth tip that I always think about when I'm writing a literature review is my structure I always need to think about what my structure is before I actually write the number of research papers the number of
literature reviews that I've read that I've had to go back and say you need to restructure this like and that takes so much time to do because you need to now rearrange your thoughts change your Center instances change the connective sentences and it takes a lot of time so it's really worthwhile spending a bit of time before you actually start writing just thinking about what kind of structure you want to use for your literature review and what makes sense for your content so there's three main types there's chronological there's thematic and there's methodological that was
a mouthful so the first is chronological which is an order of usually time and so if you're someone that's writing something maybe historical based you might want to say that happened first then that happened then that happened or it could be in order of something like when things are published if you're talking about the development of a method for example you might want to speak about what when a particular method was published first and what paper you might also want to speak about events so this happened first and then that happens so there's an order
and it's usually based in time however the Best Literature reviews are not usually chronological unless it needs to be for example like I said if it's historical and you need to speak about the earliest event first but usually you want to think about it in more of a thematic sense thematic literature reviews are based on ideas so this idea first then the second idea then a third idea and then you would write about them compare and contrast within each idea and it all comes together to be a really beautiful literature review written all together it's
a little bit more authentic when you write thematically as opposed to chronologically but like I said it does depend on your contents and then the last one is the methodological methodological I can't say the word the methodological order the last one is the methodological order and this one is based on the methods that might be used and that the authors have used within the papers that you've just read about um so this is a less common one but definitely one that might be used if you're writing about clinical reports for example or any other kind
of maybe stem type methods and then the last thing that I never failed to do this is to make sure that you have link sentences in between every single paragraph in your literature review so I'm saying the sentence that starts your paragraphs and ends your paragraphs of every single paragraph needs to be very carefully designed and I say designed because it makes such a difference in connecting your thoughts and helping the whole essay flow all together now when I read a literature review I can tell straight away if it's just ideas thrown on paper and
kind of just written out instead of right this is the idea that is the idea or if it's actually a flow of thought and a discussion and even some to some extent quite academic sounding these paragraph starters and paragraph Enders are actually sign posters um these are signposts are essentially something that tells the reader what's happening next or what's to come or what just happened or it gives you a bit of an idea of what the author which is you you is saying and how they feel about what they're writing about so signposting is a
really important uh tip that I would give you if you're aiming to get a first class and even you know what even if your content even if your literature review isn't the strongest if you have a flow like that where you're it's really obvious that you've taken time to make sure your ideas connect it makes such a difference and it actually is one of the points on every single Mark scheme it will say something like um Clarity of discussion or something along those lines um where that essentially means that you are able to connect your
thoughts and have some sort of flow within your ideas there's a few questions I always ask myself when I'm writing a literature review and I always look out for when I'm Reading literature reviews and I'll leave them over here for you so you can see as well and have those in mind when you are actually writing okay well I hope you found this video helpful um these are five things that I do every single time when I'm trying to aim for a first write my literature review really quickly and thank you for paying powerful sponsoring
the segment on the video where I mentioned them earlier I like I said really truly love it I've been using it for every single document that I have and so I really truly love it go and try it today you can try it for free and if you want to upgrade um to the paper pal Prime version to get unlimited suggestions then like I said leave the link for it in my description bar down below and also pinned in the comments let me know if you found this video helpful and if you want to see
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