Tips for managing your reading
Tips for organising the literature
Develop key words or phrases to identify these elements in each paper and enter these in your filing system. This will help you later identify all the papers covering those elements.
Evaluate or score resources as you go by recording some type of coding system such as a +/- symbol or a numerical value to indicate its usefulness.
Preparation of a literature review requires that you read a large volume of material, much of which will probably be new to you. You then have to turn this mass of words and ideas into a coherent final product.
It can be helpful to use the 'three pass' reading system to help you develop understanding and critically analyse your articles. Each pass of the paper builds on previous reading and increases your understanding and critical analysis, making it easier to synthesise (Kheshav, 2007).
Keep an eye out in the understanding and analysing processes for emerging themes or patterns within the resources you've collected. Identifying themes is very important, as they will help you synthesise your information and form the basis of your literature review.
Understanding is a process of comprehending an intended meaning.
Understanding your resources will require you to uncover information and ideas within each resource and to clarify each's intended meaning.
Reading to gain a basic understanding of a resource is sometimes called the "first pass". This pass should take about fve to ten minutes
This allows you to identify the ideas, theories, questions and controversies that underlie each piece of work.
​Make sure to take note of anything that catches your attention (your "aha!" or "fancy that!" moments) when reading your resources. These may help you focus your question and give your research direction.
Details of exactly how the various questions were tackled, as outlined in methods and results sections, can wait for a later reading of the paper.
Literature review matrix - The basics
Use this matrix to help organise and understand your resources.
Analysing = To take apart, examine in detail & identify strengths & weaknesses.
Critical analysis involves consideration and evaluation of the claims made by the author and determining their validity and application to your research.
The second pass is to help you grasp the content and main findings of the paper and could take up to an hour per paper.
At a deeper level than before you are
The third pass is all about the fine detail. This pass will take the longest.
By the end of this pass, you should have a thorough understanding of each paper.
General templates
Health & social science templates
Sciences
Arts & humanities templates
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