How to Write a Literature Review for a Dissertation Without Any Effort: Productive Hints

A literature review is written in order to make it easier for you to sort the sources you will use in your dissertation by their relevance.

The following tips will help you write a literature review effortlessly.

Narrow Down Your Search Field

First of all, you need to determine the following:

• What is the problem that the review will help you define?
• What type of literature review do you need to conduct?
• What kinds of publications will be used in the review?
• What disciplines will you need to work with?

The answers to these questions will show the direction your literature review should take. The more details you outline with your questions, the easier it will be to sort the sources.

Find Relevant Material

This will be the hardest part, because it’s very easy to get overwhelmed when sorting through the materials on some subjects. This can result in you missing something very important or adding too much irrelevant information that will lower the quality of the dissertation.

To avoid this, use the following tips:

• Use the right keywords when searching online databases. The Internet is one of the best sources of information available to people today, but it’s filled with tons of nearly useless articles. Choosing the keywords that are truly relevant to your research will help you find some invaluable pieces of information quickly.


• Look for references. There have to be a lot of people that study the same subject as you, and some of them might have written similar dissertations. Look for reference lists compiled by these people. They should be available on various online forums and personal blogs that you can find through a search engine.


• Look through personal journals. There is no doubt that Google is a great asset, but it’s not perfect. You should look into some popular journal websites and use their specialized search engines to look for tags associated with your topic.

Process the Materials Wisely

Study abstracts of the articles before you download or print them out. This will save you from wasting your time on reading anything that will be useless for the research. There are some software solutions that can help you store and manage the abstracts and references.

It’s essential to keep detailed records of your search. This will ensure that you don’t look through the same source twice. This will also help keeping track of the interesting and relevant articles.

Don’t let yourself go too far with your search. Stop after you get enough information to build a solid argument.