The best PhD literature review the world has ever seen

https://phd.academy

When I started my PhD back in 2003, one of the first things my supervisor asked me to do was write a literature review. Wanting to impress my new boss, I decided that I was going to write the best literature review the world had ever seen. So I started reading and writing, but very quickly got overwhelmed by the amount of material that was available, much of which I didn’t really understand…

So I didn’t end up writing the best literature review the world had ever seen, and in fact that particular review never even got finished. This was an early knock to my confidence… it didn’t crush me, but it just fed that little voice at the back of my head that said I wasn’t good enough.

Much later I did write a very good literature review, but it was only after figuring out how to work with work with the literature in a more efficient and effective way.

So in this video I’d like to talk about why working with the literature is so stressful, and introduce you to some other ways of thinking about it.

0:00 Intro; The best literature review the world has ever seen
1:33 About me
2:13 The sheer number of sources
3:15 Academic papers aren't written to teach
4:53 Working on the edge of knowledge
6:05 Not all published research is good
7:55 The psychological factor
9:25 How to use the literature effectively without getting overwhelmed
11:54 Most research is incremental
14:56 Writing about the literature as a way of building knowledge
17:09 Closing