怎样做好文献综述

Literature review 2: Two cycles of review process. Read thick to thin, and 
then thin to thick

Hey, it’s Dr. Liu here with Better LIFE Research TIPS. Today I want to talk about the two cycles of the whole process of literature review and some tips for reading efficiently.

It is common that, before you have a well defined research question, you may find that there are numerous papers that seem relevant to your research. And it is difficult to define your research question before you have done some research. Therefore, typically, in the first cycle or the first stage of the review process, your main job is to define your research question. In order to do that, you want to get an overview of the topic, and a deep understanding of all the key concepts. It might be helpful to read a specialized book on the topic or an online encyclopedia. You may need to browse or scan hundreds of papers in your research area, or simply from your searching results. As you read more and more, you may often go back and ask yourself, are you still satisfied with the current version of your research question. If not, you may revise it. And it is a cycle you may run multiple times.

In this cycle, you need to read a lot. So you want to read efficiently. In order to be efficient, it is not really just a matter of reading fast, the key is to read selectively. One strategy is always read the abstract first. In fact, for most papers, reading the abstract is enough. After reading the abstract, if you find the paper is relevant to your work, you may further read the introduction and the conclusion section, to decide whether the paper need more attention. Another strategy to read efficiently is to quickly identify the topic sentence of the paragraph you are reading, and skip the rest. In order to avoid being distracted by unrelated information, it would be nice to always keep your goals or questions in your mind while reading. For example, your goals may be, to identify the trends in the field, or to look for controversies on a certain issue that need discussion. One shortcut is to start from examining other people’s literature reviews on a related topic. Also, you want to consider highly cited papers first. You do not want to spend too much time on poor-quality papers and ruin your taste. As you further define your research question, you will gain a better sense of priorities, and you will be able to identify the most relevant and significant works. Therefore you can prioritize your reading. And that is what I mean by reading from thick to thin in the first cycle.

Once you have a well-defined research question, you will be able to do a more focused and intensive reading. You enter the second cycle.  In this cycle, your main job is to collect the evidences that are available in the current literature to answer the defined research question. In order to be able to analyze or synthesize these evidences in your review, you want to obtain in-depth understanding on them. So you want to conduct proactive reading instead of passive reading. Passive readers read words, but proactive readers read ideas. You want to read between lines, paying attention to not only what was said but also what was not said. For example, you may need to figure out some premises or assumptions that are not explicitly provided by the authors. In addition to reading what the authors said about what their results mean, you may need to check their results by yourselves and make your own interpretation. And that is what I mean by reading from thin to thick. In this cycle, you do not want to miss any major works that are relevant to the defined research question. You may determine the order of importance of the papers you found, and read prioritized papers in depth. As you read more, it is still possible for you to go back and further revise your research question.

In this cycle, it is very important to take notes while reading. Writing is a way of thinking; taking notes can help you to understand and find relationships between the ideas you've got from your reading. There are various note-taking systems. You may choose whichever is comfortable for you so that you can easily rearrange your notes to follow a progression of logic when writing your review. And when taking notes, it is important to always keep track of the sources of the information. Always put references into your writing.

Let’s take another look at these two cycles.  In the first cycle, you accumulate your knowledge for the general topic and the broad problem you try to solve, and as a result, you will be able to define your specific research question. After the first cycle, you know what to read. In the second cycle, you accumulate your knowledge for the defined specific research question, you collect the current evidences that are available in literature to answer that question, and as a result, you will be able to identify your chance to contribute, and therefore to propose your own solution to the question. You develop your own idea, and argument. After the second cycle, you know what to write.

During the whole review process. There are three traps to avoid. The first trap is trying to read everything, especially in the first cycle. Nowadays, so much information is easily available, it is mission impossible and unnecessary to read them all. The ability to focus selectively is the key for an efficient study. The second trap is reading but not writing, especially in the second cycle. Of course it is always good practice to start taking notes earlier. The key is, you do not want to wait until the last minute to start writing. The third trap is not keeping track of the sources of information while taking notes. Whenever you write down something may be useful for your review, you should always put reference there. It will save you a lot of time when it is time to write the your review. You don’t want to waste time to identify the correct reference for the information you want to cite.

Those are the three traps you definitely want to avoid. And while reviewing and taking notes, in order to better organize your ideas, three are three tips you may want to consider. The first tip is to use a table. A table is a good way to summarize the results, especially for a large number of references. A table like this will make it easier for comparing or contrasting concepts or ideas from different studies. The concepts here can also be research methods or results on certain issue.

The second tip is to sketch, and visualize your ideas on one page of paper using circles, lines and arrows. When you have an idea, write it down and draw a circle around it. When you have another idea or a reference which supports this idea, do the same, and connect the two circles with a line and arrow. And you can do this continuously to link all your ideas and the evidences in references that support these ideas. This simple method will allow you to see how things tie together at a glance. It doesn't have to be beautiful. But it will help you to organize your review around your ideas, but not around the references themselves. The third tip is to write your own abstract for the important papers you read. You may summarize which information in these papers are important to your research. It will help you to better organize these papers and use them effectively in your review.

Thanks for watching, I am Dr. Liu with research tips for the underdogs. In the next video, I will talk about how to generate a good research question, and what are the three rhetorical patterns for developing a viable research question. Until next time, keep studying for a better life.

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