How does everyone do their lterature reviews? [duplicate]

Question

I have to do a literature review and have never done one before. What are some methods to do this?

Answer 1

First do a search for papers on the topic. A librarian can help with this as can online tools. But the bibliography of each paper you find will point to other papers. It can be a long process.

Read a lot of those papers. Try to summarize them in a few sentences. Index cards are good for this sort of thing, actually.

It used to be harder to find such papers when only hard-copy in libraries was available, but it is now just as hard to read and summarize them. There aren't a lot of effective shortcuts for that if you want to learn anything. Look for insight.

And you have to sort things for relevance.

The point of it is both to learn something in your own work, so that you don't overlook the obvious (or the already done) and to place your own work in context.