hey everyone welcome to the grad coach podcast my name is Derek and today I'm joined by Dr ethar one of our trusty coaches and we're going to be talking about four cheat codes that you can use to FastTrack your literature review if you're currently working on a literature review you definitely want to watch this also you probably want to grab a copy of our free literature review template over on the gr coach blog you can find the link to that in the description so without further delay let's get this party started ether welcome to the
Pod welcome to it thank you for having me all right so cheat code number one is to use your research aims and your research questions to optimize your literature search there a lot of big words there there's a lot of jogg in there what is a literature search and what are we doing when we talk about using your research as and research questions to optimize this search so it sounds a lot more stressful than than it is but it's a relatively straightforward idea in terms of the literature search all we're really talking about is the
use of the databases that you might expect or the search engines that you might expect to be able to find the literature that you need for the purposes of your literature review those are things like Google Scholar J store web of science Web of Knowledge or your University's academic database any of those are just like any typical search engine you just type in either the key words that you're looking for or key terms you're looking for and then it will just bring you up a list of all the research that they they it thinks it
is appropriate for what you've just searched that being said often what that will do is produce thousands and thousands thousands and thousands of results which means you're then going to have to troll through all of that information and try to figure out what does and does not relate to your research aims research questions or your topic generally speaking to make sure you've got that alignment and golden thread running the whole way through your work well a shorthand way of doing this is using the language in your research questions specifically to inform the Search terms that
you use when you're looking for your lit and I mean this in almost literal terms so whatever your research questions might happen to be you'll use the words the keywords within that research question and type those into your library database academic Library database and see what results come up and what that should mean is that the results that do come up in the first instance will be much much more refined than just a broad openend it search but it will also mean that they're very very very closely related to your particular concerns and avoids the
risks of superfluity and talking on the fringes of your research it means that every is going to be directly focused on what it needs to be so you can be that much more confident about the research that you're citing and what you're going to be talking about in your lit review it's so easy to get distracted and to digress in your literature review you know there's there's so much literature that you're going to be looking at it's so easy to just digress and to read not necessarily too much but to write too much because you've
just got so much literature that you're trying to cover and so your research aims and your research questions are not only a way to fast trck that reading process but also to just make sure that you really stay on track and that you stay focused because literature reviews then do tend to digress and do tend to go off topic so use your research aims and use your research questions perhaps even your research objectives to optimize that literature search so on to cheat code number two and that is to plan out a loose structure of some
sort before you start writing Dr E why is this so important and what what do we mean by structure what do students need to do yeah all right so this is this is where it starts to get really interesting because the idea is increasingly to start to try to use the rules and regulations about how to write projects and essays and papers and academic writing generally speaking to your advantage one of those things is exactly as you're mentioning a structure up front and we can kind of link that to the research questions that you you
were using previously try to identify the appropriate literature so one of the things that you could do not saying that you have to in every single case but one thing one could do is in structuring your literature review that's to say preparing what it is that you're going to write and where you're going to write it or what you're going to write about you could again use the information that you've taken from your literature search as well as your research questions to try to determine what your topics and subtopics should be in your literature review
ahead of time so what that means is that you know that the start of your literature review is going to include an introduction you know that your literature review is going to go through the major topics that you need to discuss to cover your research and you know your literature review is going to include a conclusion roughly speaking so the only area of ambiguity is the main body of the work that is to say the main sections where you're going into the the work that relates to your research and if that's being informed by your
research questions that is to say not necessarily using them word for word as titles or subtitles but being informed by them so roughly the same thing and using the literature that you found from those research questions as well to inform the uh input in that part of the literature review too it should make the process a lot easier because it means that before you start writing and again before you see that dreaded blinking cursor on a blank page you've already got a sense of what you're going to write and when you're going to write it
the dreaded blinking cursor yeah the struggle of every student yeah that then this initial outline is just such a underestimated asset to any students's writing process you know so often students are either faced with the challenge of not knowing what to write or have you know a thousand things spinning around in their heads and not knowing where they go with this and as a result they just land up with this massive lump this seething mess of a literature review and so again that issue of of staying focused staying on track this rarely gets solved by
having some sort of outline up front and this doesn't need to be detailed this can just be a set of bullet points you can be jotting things down you can go into as little or as much detail as you like but have something that you're going to work with and uh and and keep in mind that you're not committed to this thing you know if you find that you're writing uh halfway through your literature review and you feel that actually I kind of forgot about that and I forgot about this and we need to move
things around that's completely completely fine but it's better to be restructuring uh while you're writing rather than trying to develop a structure while you're you know just thought vomiting or word vomiting uh text onto paper so very very important all right so on to cheat code number three for your literature review this is a biggie and that is that you want to aim for analytical writing as opposed to descriptive writing now again some big words here some technical words what do these things mean and how do students ensure that they are focusing on the analytical
as opposed to the descriptive I mean it's a question that comes up really really often kind of disappointing how often the question comes up considering you think that that should be the only thing that we're concerned with and the myth is the the distraction of the terminology so when we're talking about analytical writing or critical writing or critical analysis often you'll hear these phrase used interchangeably and they ultimately mean the same thing the the key issue here is the variation what we're talking about as you said between descriptive writing and analytical writing or critical analysis
or critical writing and you can find um our blog post on this issue and they talk about the same thing there but what you're the key issue or the key terms that you want to familiarize yourself with is this idea that in descriptive writing we're really just talking about what happened so it's more kind of like a linear progression of of the events or a description as it were of of what occurred in this particular phenomenon that we're talking about when you're talking critically or we're thinking analytically it's the so what as opposed to what
next uh and in the so what what we're talking about here principally is what's the impact or what's the significance uh what's the meaning what's the value of the point that we're observing and particularly when we're talking about research projects is what its impact significance and value to our research questions and our research Aim so it's not just a broad analysis of okay well what does this statement mean generally speaking in Life or what does this statement mean generally speaking to this topic but it's a much much more specific issue of what does this statement
mean or what does this claim mean or what are these stats and what does this data mean specifically with respect to my research aim and my research questions and that should start you in the process of picking apart statistics data quotes and claims made by other sources and getting you into that critical analysis so so so true and I think as you've clearly said this distinction between what happened or what is and so what what does this mean for the research question this is so important but I think what a lot of students misunderstand once
they make that distinction is that then they must only write analytically and that would also be a misunderstanding because you need some description you need to State the what in order to State the so what and so a mistake can happen in sort of two flavors here where students only discuss the so what and then the reader kind of going well how did you draw that conclusion you know what what's the basis of your argument there or more commonly they just describe the what they just say well this author said this and this author said
that and just nothing further no therefore no you know consequently this or that so it's really really important to aim for the analytical but make sure that of course that you're still building on a foundation of descriptive throughout your literature review so this all sounds a bit fluffy a bit conceptual a bit theoretical so let's try and break this down to some real world terms in terms of what we mean with the difference with with descriptive versus analytic or critical writing so to give you just an example typically what might happen when you're doing your
literature review or what we see happening very often is you'll just compile a list of what other authors have said said in the area that you're interested in and perhaps you're doing this even if you are using your research questions to guide the information so you found two or three sources that specifically say things that perhaps confirm your suspicions or confirm your uh intentions or confirm your research aim and you feel good about that because it means it's being validated by two or three other sources and you can say that Johnson 2019 said such and
such and Mary Le ofit 2012 said such and such and whatever it might happen to be and you site all of those sources and say that they will confirm whatever that that belief is or whatever that research aim is that you're pursuing but even in the instances where there's absolute 100% alignment between yourself and the research or the literature that you're looking at or that is to say even when you find those cases where you fully agree with one another even that instance presents an opportunity for some meaningful critical or analytic writing or critical analysis
because in that instance you'd ask yourself the so what namely well even if it's the case that all of my sources tend to completely agree with either my data or my assumptions or my research aims or questions well there's a question as to why that might be the case so so what if everybody agrees with you well so what that everybody agrees with you what does it mean that everybody should agree because it's interesting that for example you might happen to find three or four different sources from three or four different places perhaps in the
United States and Europe or different places across the globe and at three or four different times one published in 2012 one published in 2019 one published in 2020 but they all seem to say exactly the same thing or all find perfect alignment with one another including yourself I mean that suggests something there's a there's a so what here that's significant and the implication is either we're all adopting a method that seems to be not paying any attention to the variations in time and space or this the subject that we're studying really doesn't change over time
and space but in either case there is certainly a soat here to take into consideration even in those cases where you find perfect alignment between yourself and your sources often the easiest way to think about the Sol war is where there's difference but in this this case it could still work so that critical writing or or the analytic writing is really really really important in terms of just pushing your literature review forward and fig figuring out the things that make it matter most so true so true it's it's it's very tempting when we find just
perfect agreement in the literature to just go okay therefore it must be true but there is always a fly in the ointment if one looks close enough so do ensure that you think critically even when everyone agrees and when they don't agree that that's even more exciting because then that presents potentially a research Gap and so your argument could be that this group of researchers found X but contrasted to that this group of researchers found y presenting some sort of research Gap that this isn't quite settled and so whatever the case may be whether you're
finding a lot of agreement or a lot of disagreement draw your conclusion say so what you know therefore this therefore that all right so on to our fourth and final last but not least cheat code for writing your literature review and that is to use quote sandwiches what exactly does this mean what is a quote sandwich all right so you have to forgive me this is not like a technical term it's not a term you're going to find in the textbooks and if you go and Google this you're going to get some really weird results
so if that happens don't blame me I didn't do that and yes I was hungry at the time when I came up with it I apologized we work too much like what do you want from me but long and short the quote sandwiches are really the part that that I get the most excited about and the quote sandwich is what happens when you follow the unwritten rule of introducing any quotation that you use from any source and then following that quotation with an explanatory sentence so what you're doing effectively is sandwiching the quotation that you're
taking with an introductory sentence and then following that with an explanatory sentence so you've got like the two pieces of bread as it were your introduction explanatory sentences around the quote which is the meat of your sandwich or the Cucumbers if you're a vegetarian but you get my point so the idea here is that what it means is that in every single case you can ensure that whenever you know you're going to use a quote or use a reference or a citation to a particular Source you can build in ahead of time those phrases that
you know are relatively generic expected the things that you're supposed to be doing so to give you an example of what that might look like typically if I'm quoting a source before I site The Source or before I quote The Source themselves you might say something like you know 2019 in his paper said the same thing dot dot dot dot dot and then You' go into the quotation from the source and then following the quotation from The Source you might say something like therefore at least in this case uh Johnson believes that y y y
y y whatever the end of that sentence is now the advantage here is that neither of these sentences need to be perfectly completed you don't necessarily have to have a finished introductory sentence or a finished explanatory sentence at this stage you will of course do that further down the line but when you're busy making a structure and an outline and and planning what your literature review is going to look like it's really really helpful to plug those quote sandwiches in ahead of time so one it gives you a sense of the direction you know which
quote you're working towards before you have to then move on to your main points but two those generic predictable sentences are already there for you so you don't have to waste too much time worrying about how I'm going to do that or making sure it's done this way you can focus all of your attention on the critical analysis or on the the focus points of your research that to say the issues in your literature review that make that literature review stand out and make it significant so using those quote sandwiches just means it gives you
that little bit of advantage and since we know it's an Unwritten rule we plug it in ahead of time make it really easy for ourselves and there you go now you can have an actual soundwich while you're writing a lit riew see so so true uh quite often we see these literature reviews where a student has uh dropped in a quote and just expected that this quote's going to speak for itself that it's just going to you know create that oh aha moment in the reader's mind and and I think it's sort of a a
takeaway perhaps from less academic types of writing in books uh especially self-help and business books there'll just be these sprinkles of quotes and motivational quotes here and there and um uh that's not how it works in Academia you need to provide a bit of an introduction to the quotes and then you need to draw your conclusion from it this this really links into our previous point about critical versus descriptive where you know if you're just dropping the quote in that's really just describing the quote whereas if you're actually introducing it and then drawing some conclusion
from it you're getting a bit more analytical so stick to the sandwiches nice invention there doctor I mean this what I do this is light work like you know this is a little bit it's just a sandwich you know it's an entry part of the meal we haven't got to the main course yet like you wait until you get to the rest of our coach course just bring a hungry stomach we'll be fine right so to recap the four little cheat codes that we have covered in today's episode is number one to use your research
aims and research questions to optimize your literature search or to lead your literature search number two to plan out some sort of structure before you start writing the before is the emphasis there number three is to aim for the analytical as opposed to the descriptive and how could we forget number four to make use of those quote sandwiches so ether thank you so much for sharing your cheat codes with us and uh I'm sure they'll be very very useful to all of our students pleasure to be of service I mean it's just what Dr E
does it's just a little bit as we said it's a little bit of light work a little bit of Coach cost and a little bit of an introduction to how to break down those lit reviews but there's much much much much more to this the key thing is the understanding that this is It's a generic process there's a straightforward way to do this and what we want to do is to take away all the concerns all the worries about all of those formalities and focus your attention on what makes your particular research project unique stand
out and effective that's really the key issue all right so that wraps up this episode remember if you are currently working on a literature review you can grab a copy of our popular literature review template that's completely free and you can get it on the grad coach blog you can find the link to that in the description if you got value from this video please do hit the like And subscribe buttons and you'll definitely want to check out this one next see you there
