It is probably safe to say that most people conducting research come across some challenges when it comes to reading and identifying a “gap” in existing research that we aim to fill with our own studies. I have been reading a lot of information recently for this purpose and in the process, trying to find ways of organising what I find. Collaborating with other research students and academics as well as meeting regularly with my supervisors has assisted me to solidify some of my key ideas and make sense of the material I am reading.
I would like to share a couple ways in which I have progressed my approaches to reading and reviewing literature.
Create a reading log
I have found it is particularly helpful, especially at the first stages of reading, to outline a range of ideas that are presented in each text. A reading log can include something like this:
Publication details
Main argument of the text
Methodologies used
Relevance to my own research
Once you are able to identify these four basic elements for each paper you read, you might start to build a set of notes that doesn’t deviate too much from the main purpose of your reading which is to engage with a scope of literature and pull out ideas that relate to your “gap”. When I initially started reading, I had a rough idea of what I was looking for but my notes had no structure and were missing information, especially the relevance of each text to my research. When I referred back to the four key areas, I found that my notes had more direction and clarity. It is important to keep in mind that this may not necessarily be a method that works for all types of researchers and projects.
Develop a visual map of the key ideas
Anytime I have struggled with my thinking it is often because I have not yet created a visual representation of the task. Again, this may not be an approach that suits all but it certainly has been a crucial step in crystalizing the main segments of my literature review. There are so many ways to go about organising concepts depending on the type of discipline or field you are working within. I spent a significant amount of time pondering ways of laying out the literature review and ended up creating a table with two columns. My research is situated within two key areas of literature which are international higher education and applied linguistics. Both of which deal with the experiences of students and their uses of language in their learning at university. Each column was dedicated to one field, this ways ensuring that I could see side by side the ideas that connected to one another and the ideas that were unique to that field.
The colours show where in some cases the same ideas are addressed in both fields and where in other cases, the ideas only exist within one field. This may seem quite an obvious approach but it is one of many that I could have taken. At this stage, what was in the table was not organised in any capacity. The next step was to place them into categories. I began to map out which ideas were overarching and which other ideas they were built of.
The final step was putting together a full map of what I was going to outline. I positioned each main idea as its own bubble and surrounding each bubble were the sub ideas as I have called them.
Now I have to figure out how I am going to put this visualisation into writing. There are so many ways to structure reading and reviews of literature so please consider sharing your skills and techniques!
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