The Literature Review Six Steps To Success 2nd Edition

Getting Your Literature Review Done Without Losing Your Mind

Most people approach a literature review backwards. They start searching for sources before they've figured out what question they're actually trying to answer. I've sat across from graduate students who spent three weeks reading papers only to realize their research question had shifted twice in the meantime. The framework in The Literature Review Six Steps To Success 2nd Edition exists because that pattern is nearly universal, and the people who wrote it have seen it play out in hundreds of thesis committees. I'll walk through what each step actually looks like in practice, not just the definitions. I'm also going to point out where the method breaks down and where I've had to work around it, because the second edition doesn't cover every edge case.

The Literature Review Six Steps To Success 2nd Edition

Step one is defining the scope and research question. This sounds obvious, but the second edition is specific about making this question narrow enough to be answerable within the constraints of your timeline and word limit. A question like "What is the impact of social media on mental health?" will drown you. It pulls in sociology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and marketing literature simultaneously. A scoped question like "What do longitudinal studies published between 2018 and 2024 show about the relationship between daily Instagram use and adolescent anxiety symptoms?" is manageable. I spent four months once on a review that lacked this kind of specificity early on. What saved me was going back to step one, cutting the scope by half, and redoing the search strategy. It still took longer than I wanted, but it was finishable. Step two is developing search terms and identifying databases. Here's where beginners get tripped up. You don't just type your question into Google Scholar and call it a day. You build a keyword matrix. List your core concepts, then brainstorm synonyms, related terms, and alternate phrasings for each one. If your concept is "telehealth," you also need "remote consultation," "virtual care," "e-health," and "digital health intervention" depending on the database. Boolean operators matter here. AND narrows, OR broadens, and NOT can exclude irrelevant fields but sometimes excludes exactly the paper you needed. I typically run searches in PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science for anything medical or health-adjacent. For education or social science topics, ERIC and PsycINFO are non-negotiable. The second edition covers this adequately, but it doesn't emphasize that different databases index different journal subsets, which means searching only one will leave gaps in your coverage. Step three involves screening and selecting sources. Most people want to read everything they find. You don't. The second edition walks through using inclusion and exclusion criteria systematically. Title and abstract screening comes first, then full-text review for the survivors. I keep an Excel sheet with columns for author, year, title, database, inclusion status, and reason for exclusion. Even if your review ends up with 40 sources, you might screen 400 titles. Writing down why you excluded something isn't just for show. When a committee member asks why you didn't cite a particular study, you need to point to a documented criterion, not a vague feeling. I learned this the hard way during my own dissertation defense when someone pulled up a paper I'd skimmed and dismissed in week two. My documentation had the exclusion reason clearly noted, which deflected the challenge without embarrassing anyone.

Step four is extracting and organizing data from the selected sources. This is the step most people rush through, and it's the one that causes the most trouble later. You need a consistent extraction template. Author, year, sample size, methodology, key findings, limitations, and relevance to your research question. Some people use reference managers like Zotero or EndNote with custom fields. Others build spreadsheets. The method doesn't matter as much as consistency. I once had to re-extract data from about thirty papers because my initial system was too loose and I couldn't compare studies side by side. It cost me roughly a week. The second edition provides template examples that save you from that particular pain, but I found their templates leaned heavily toward quantitative studies. If you're reviewing mixed-methods or qualitative work, you'll need to add fields for thematic analysis outcomes or narrative findings. Step five is synthesizing the literature. This is where the actual writing happens, and where most reviews fall apart. Synthesis doesn't mean summarizing one paper after another in sequence. That's aannotated bibliography, not a literature review. You organize by theme, by methodological approach, by chronological development of the field, or by theoretical framework. The second edition walks through how to identify patterns across studies and where the disagreements lie. I think the book understates one thing: synthesis requires you to be willing to kill your darlings. You will find beautiful, relevant papers that don't fit the emerging themes. They stay in your folder but don't make it into the review. It feels bad at first. It's necessary. Step six is writing and revising the review. A literature review has its own structure. Introduction establishes the scope and significance. Body is organized thematically. Conclusion identifies gaps and points toward where research needs to go next. The second edition gives a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of this process. What it doesn't emphasize enough is that revision is where the review actually becomes good. Your first draft will be descriptive rather than analytical. That's normal. Go through it again and ask each paragraph whether it's making an argument or just reporting what someone else found. If it's just reporting, rewrite it to connect to your broader point. I typically do at least three revision passes. First for structure and flow. Second for argument and synthesis. Third for precision and citation accuracy.

There are real limitations to this framework. The six-step model assumes you have time and access to academic databases. If you're working under a tight deadline with limited library access, some of these steps collapse into each other. The model also doesn't handle scoping reviews or systematic reviews particularly well. Those require PRISMA guidelines and protocol registration, which go well beyond what this book covers. If your project requires a systematic review, you should be using the Cochrane Handbook or the PRISMA 2020 statement instead. The Literature Review Six Steps To Success 2nd Edition is aimed at standard narrative reviews, which is the vast majority of student and early-career work. Another thing the book doesn't fully address is the emotional component. Literature reviews are boring, repetitive, and isolating. You will hit walls where nothing makes sense and you'll question whether you're competent enough to do this work. That's not a sign you're failing. It's a sign you're reading deeply enough that you're encountering the actual complexity of the field. Everyone goes through it. The workaround I found useful was setting small daily targets instead of open-ended goals. Thirty minutes of screening or two extracted papers per day. It sounds trivial, but it kept me moving when the project felt infinite. If you're looking to get the book, it's available through academic publishers and major retailers. The second edition came out a few years ago and includes updated guidance on digital search tools and reference management software that the first edition didn't cover. It's not free, but it's cheaper than a semester of confusion.