Every graduate student has to do one at some point.

There's a right and a wrong way to go about it.

You do it the wrong way, you're in for headache, frustration, and a lot of waste of time.

You do it right, not only are you going to have a whole lot more fun, but your life's going to be easier and it's going to pave the way for your research proposal, thesis, or even PhD dissertation.

So you're going to want to watch this video in full because I'm going to explain what this literature review is,

I'm going to share with you common traps and pitfalls not to fall into, and by the end of it, if you watch in full, you're going to have a step-by-step guide for doing your review.

Why should you listen to me?

I'm Professor David Stuckler.

I'm coming to you from my office in Milan at Bocconi University, and I've published over 350 articles in academic journals, and I have mentored and trained hundreds of graduate students to do literature reviews, and they have had amazing results.

So stick around to this video in full because I'm also going to drop in a secret tip that I wish I knew as a graduate student that's going to help you get your literature review done not only well, but fast.

So let's go ahead and dive straight in.

The first question we need to address is, what is a literature review?

And the best way to think about this is a bit like if you're going to have coffee with an old friend.

It could be a friend you haven't seen in five, ten years.

You've got a lot to catch up on.

And so in the course of this conversation, your friend is probably going to bring you up to speed with things that have been going on in his or her life.

Friendships, relationships, what's going on with work.

And by the end of this conversation, could take you half an hour, could take you an hour, you're going to have a pretty good sense of how your friend's doing.

You may have a deep sense what her hopes, his or her hopes are, what dreams are, what things are going well, what things are not going so well.

And this is just like a literature review because what a literature review is going to do for you in your field is going to bring together what are the key concepts on your topic in your field.

It's going to effectively give you a snapshot of the state of knowledge, the state of the art in the field that you're doing a review on.

And importantly, while it may not always be directly put out there, but it could be, you're going to uncover what are the gaps in that area.

What are the areas of debate?

And what are the potential areas of contribution?

So that's what a literature review is.

Let's go into five steps for how to do it.

Now, there's an overarching theme, a challenge you're going to have to overcome at some stage to be effective.

And that's finding structure.

If you already know a little bit about your topic, you may already have in mind a structure for your literature review.

But if not, don't worry, we're going to get there.

So the very first step, what you're going to want to do in your literature review is dive straight in.

And I think sometimes my students get stuck.

They don't know what to do and spit paralysis by analysis.

They're overthinking.

At this stage, you need to learn more.

You need to get your feet wet and your hands dirty.

So how do you go about doing that?

Well, you're going to go straight in to Google Scholar and you're going to do a search.

Now, if you're doing a systematic review, that's a different kettle of fish.

It's a different area and takes different techniques.

Click in the link below.

I've got a different video on how to do a systematic review or a literature review.

Google Scholar is fine.

And what it's going to do, especially in this initial search, is it's going to bring you right up to speed with one of the top papers and contributions in your field.

So I've just popped in here in a quality and health to have a quick look.

And what you can see here is a series of the top sided papers that can be recent, that can be less recent, but you can always filter it here on this left sidebar.

And this is going to be a starting point.

I'm assuming that you know very little about your topic to begin with.

And so what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to download these papers.

You can click on the PDF links here.

If you can't find it, you can sometimes click on the all 31 versions.

As in this example, go and find a PDF, download all these on your computer.

And you're going to read through these and you're going to start summarizing them in a Word document.

So I would take the first 10 to 15 that look relevant for your topic, download them, and then you are ready for step two.

So step two is what I call the strip method.

And because now that you've gone through and started to mine articles in your initial search, you're going to strip out key information and content from it.

And by strip, I mean, you're going to do this in a relatively violent fashion.

Let me show you an example.

So here you can see what I've done for each of the papers in our initial search.

I've taken the citation and I've lined them up in a Word document.

Then what I'm going to do, by now you've downloaded your PDFs, is I'm going to take the PDF and I'm going to look alongside it here.

I'm going to go carefully through the PDF and I am going to start stripping out key points and information.

So for example, I look here in the abstract and I can see a key point here that is relevant and is a summary finding from this paper.

Now, don't worry, this is going to look messy.

It's going to be ugly.

We're going to clean it up later.

But do always make sure you have the citation in here because we do not want to risk plagiarism.

And that is especially why we are lining things up in this way.

So you're going to go through each paper and things that are relevant to the points that this paper make, you're going to carefully come through and you're going to highlight, pull it out, strip it, and start lining it up in each of these paper headings.

So to give you a little more detail before going on to the next step, what you want to do now is with the evidence that you've stripped, you want to start suturing it together and explaining it.

You want to make sure you cover for each of these papers what the authors did, what they found, and possibly what they suggest for future research.

So for example, here, this study, I looked at closely and found it was a systematic review of how inequality impacts health.

Their key conclusion was that they found evidence that they argued was a causal link.

So you're going to go through, write this up.

And you might even take a quote directly from the paper, now putting quotes around it to, again, avoid any risk of plagiarism.

And they also have an explanation for why some studies found different results, which they said here, that the other studies, some studies found opposite results, which they explained by the way it was measured, the inclusion of mediating variables, and some other factors.

So their overall conclusion was that narrowing gaps in inequality will improve the health and well-being of populations.

So what you want to do, you want to say what the authors did, what they found, any key quotes or evidence that you think is relevant, highlighting those, and any contradictory information that might be relevant.

Continuing with the same example, what I'm starting to see emerge is that structure that I was looking for that breaks apart these articles.

I'm seeing that some authors are finding evidence that there is a causal link.

Other authors, like this paper here, found that there is no direct link.

So this is an important observation that you want to make along the way, because this is going to help you when you write up what you found on your literature review to summarize your articles.

So you may now proceed to your next step, which is developing a conceptual framework.

And this is the framework that's really going to be the backbone or the skeleton of your paper.

And that is a step that you want to get to from your initial search.

So there are different ways you can start to find this structure, conceptual framework out of your initial search.

Here, I found an example of some papers found evidence of a causal link.

Other papers found that there was association, but not causation.

And so I'll probably proceed in this literature review to summarize those two separately.

But there are different ways to go, depending on your area.

One way is chronological.

This might especially apply in history reviews.

Another way might be to go from papers that describe the problem to papers that test or characterize solutions to that problem.

Another common one that many of my students have done is summarize the evidence at the individual level, and then move to summarizing evidence in the literature at a population level.

Another might be to break up by key themes.

Look, there is no one size fits all solution to what conceptual framework is right for you.

Now, you may know going in at the very beginning if you already have experience, but if not, you're going to want to do this first two steps of your initial search, then stripping out information, lining up those articles, and start to see the structure emerge that's right for you.

Now, at this stage that you have decided on your structure, it is a point at which you can finish your search.

So you may want to go into Google Scholar and put in additional terms, but you may also want to do what I call a snowball method.

And this snowball sampling essentially goes from takes a paper that you've already looked at.

I'm going to continue with the example we just had.

And when you find now a paper that found causal evidence, or could be described as a problem or solution or whatever framework that you've got, you can go down and you can chase up these references.

So, for example, here, I'm particularly interested in some contradictory evidence.

And so this study here found that there was no relation in when they looked at the elderly.

So I'm going to click here and I'm going to go to this reference.

I'm going to go look up this study.

I'm going to download it and I'm going to add it to my list of papers.

And I'm going to start threading it in to that conceptual framework.

I'm going to map these studies in, lining them all up.

So once you've done these steps, you've completed the search for your literature.

You're now ready to start writing up.

And I wanted to introduce you to the fourth step.

I call it PEER.

And this is the system that was taught to me as a graduate student.

And I've since taught it to my graduate students that have had great success with it.

And it basically tells us the anatomy of a paragraph.

And that's called PEER.

Point, example, explain, repeat.

And I'm going to go through how you can use this guide to make sure your academic writing is on point.

So let's go through a concrete example.

Continuing with the theme of inequality and health.

You'll see what I've begun to do in the document is create that backbone, that skeleton here, highlighting in italics, evidence for a causal link where I'm going to place all the studies making this case.

Now, you may further break this down into subsections.

In this case, you might want to look at those studies as a subtheme, looking at inequality and physical health, or those studies looking at inequality and mental health, whatever's pertinent to your topic.

But for the sake of an example, here I want to show you how the PEER system works in practice.

So each paragraph should make one big point.

And that's captured and encapsulated in the first sentence, sometimes called the topic sentence.

And this is going to lay out.

It's going to make it easier for your reader because they're going to know what they're going to get from this paragraph right away at a glance.

Several studies found that inequality had a causal relationship with ill health.

That is your point of this paragraph.

What comes next is the E part, the evidence or examples of the PEER system.

So now I'm including a discussion of the studies that fit into this category.

For example, Wilkinson and Pickett found this.

Jameson and colleagues found this.

That is your example or your evidence.

Third component of PEER, explain.

Why did they conclude that there was a causal relationship here?

And you want to have a explanation that goes along and accompanies this example.

In this case, I point out a few of these studies that these authors argued that the evidence met common criteria for causality, such as temporality, strength of association, specificity.

It's just an example.

This is going to vary depending on your field.

Then finally, you're going to have a repeating or linking point, the R in PEER, which is, again, coming back to your conclusion that these authors concluded there's a strong case for causality.

You may even refine your statement saying that for causality when looking at broad geographic areas.

And I clearly can't spell.

So this is the anatomy using PEER of what a good paragraph should look like, each paragraph making one clear point.

Now, after you've done this, you'll have filled out the main findings, the main points of your literature review.

You're going to get to the very last steps, and that is the conclusion and introduction.

And notice I put it in that order for a reason.

That's because the introduction is the hardest part to write.

It is the part that takes more creativity and more energy.

And I see so often students actually do this the opposite.

They start with the introduction.

They get stuck.

They bang their head against the wall.

They feel frustrated, and they waste a lot of time until they get to a deadline.

And then it's a crisis point, and they panic.

If you follow these steps, that's not going to happen to you.

So what you want to do is that by this point, you've summarized all your studies using the peer system, and you're going to write the conclusion next.

Now, the conclusion follows a very common structure.