Anyone who regards literature review as easy, either has super powers, or talks nonsense. It is hard work, requires exceptional memory, and integrative writing abilities.
The seeking for relevant and appropriate literature requires well developed searching techniques and precise search terminology. Having accumulated a collection of probable literature requires time, art and endurance to synthesise.
Being impatient by nature, but with perceived frustratingly inadequate memory abilities, I developed an accretive approach that works for me. In essence, I start summarising soonest, and capture each manuscript’s referencing details 100% according to the required publishing style.
Accretive means ‘growing together from separate or disparate parts into a single whole’—the ideal of a literature overview is to present a synthesis of the body of knowledge relevant to the issue under investigation.
Sometimes, when fortunate, the content of a single manuscript serves as foundation, or core, onto which to build other summaries—a ‘coming together and cohesion of matter’. Often it seems necessary to explore a cited reference, from which deeper insight is derived.
Other times, however, small snippets of knowledge gained appear to be unrelated. I capture these unrelated summaries as paragraphs in a MS Word document, with both in-text references and complete references listed at the end. There are various software packages available to enable this process, but at times mastery of such or the costs are prohibitive.
Sometimes it appears necessary to revisit articles initially found of little relevance, because of added insights.
This process could take hours, days or weeks, depending on the scope of body of knowledge that informs the current study.
The objective of a good literature review is to provide a concise introduction, followed by a well-presented line of argument with comprehensive referencing, ending with a synopsis of what was found. This synopsis serves as linkage to the problem statement or hypothesis of the current study.