One of the challenges I often see with students’ literature reviews is that they will report the results of a study they read in an article as summarized in the article’s abstract, rather than the detailed findings laid out in the results section of the article. This poses a problem when you are writing a literature review because you need to provide specific and clear facts that support your understanding of the literature, such as the study’s context (e.g., geographic location, details about study participants, type of study) and detailed findings (e.g., statistical data or qualitative themes). The abstract may say something like: “we found that poverty is associated with academic achievement.” For your literature review, you want the details, not the summary. In the results section of the article, you may find a sentence that states: “Canadian children living in households experiencing poverty are three times more likely to have failed at least one course.” This more specific statistical information provides a stronger basis on which to build the arguments in your literature review.

Journaling your search process

Organizing information

As you are gathering sources and skimming the abstract, introduction, and conclusion to determine if they are relevant to your topic, you will want to start recording important information as you are reading. A simple way to organize the information is to create a spreadsheet or table.

A basic summary table is provided below. Remember, although “the means of summarizing can vary, the key at this point is to make sure you understand what you’ve found and how it relates to your topic and research question” (Bennard et al., 2014, para. 10).^[1].

A good summary table will also ensure that when you cite these articles in your literature review, you are able to provide the necessary detail and context for readers to properly understand the results. For example, one of the common errors I see in student literature reviews is using a small, exploratory study to represent the truth about a larger population. You will also notice important differences in how variables are measured or how people are sampled, for instance, and these details are often the source of a good critical review of the literature.

As you read an article in detail, we suggest copying any facts you find relevant in your summary table – I recommend using the Thematic Analysis Grid technique by Anderson et al. (2015), which I describe in detail below. You should copy and paste any fact or argument you consider important. Some good examples include definitions of concepts, statistics about the size of the social problem, and empirical evidence about the key variables in the research question, among countless others. Facts for your literature review are principally found in the introduction, results, and discussion section of an empirical article or at any point in a non-empirical article.

Copy and paste into your notes anything you may want to use in your literature review, and remember to include page numbers for direct quotes so you can appropriately attribute the information your are drawing upon. You must make sure you note the original source of each bit of information you copy. Nothing is worse than needing to track down a source for a fact you read who-knows-where. If you found a statistic that the author used in the introduction, it almost certainly came from another source that the author cited in a footnote or internal citation. You will want to check the original source to make sure the author represented the information correctly. This is important. Too often I see students citing “Ramirez 2015 as cited by Jones, 2024). Always go to the original source, especially if it a recent publication. Moreover, you may want to read the original study to learn more about your topic and discover other sources relevant to your inquiry.

Assuming you have pulled all of the facts out of multiple articles, it’s time to start thinking about how these pieces of information relate to each other. Start grouping each fact into themes and subthemes. For example, a statistic stating that single adults who are homeless are more likely to be male may fit into a category of gender and homelessness. For each topic or subtopic you identify during your critical analysis of each paper, determine what those papers have in common. Likewise, determine which differ. If there are contradictory findings, you may be able to identify methodological or theoretical differences that could account for these contradictions. For example, one study may sample only high-income earners or those living in a rural area. Determine what general conclusions you can report about the topic or subtopic, based on all of the information you’ve found. Keep in mind that your themes may change over time, as may their definitions. This is a natural reflection of the learning you are doing.

As you step back from your notes, you should assess which themes you have enough research support to allow you to draw strong conclusions. You should also assess which areas you need to do more research in before you can write a robust literature review. The summary table should serve as a transitional document between the notes you write on each source and the literature review you submit to your professor.

Putting the pieces together: Building a concept map

Developing a concept map or mind map around your topic can be helpful in figuring out how the facts fit together. We talked about concept mapping previously in this text when we were first thinking about your topic and sketching out what you already know about it. Concept mapping during the literature review stage of a research project builds on this foundation of knowledge and aims to improve the “description of the breadth and depth of literature in a domain of inquiry. It also facilitates identification of the number and nature of studies underpinning mapped relationships among concepts, thus laying the groundwork for systematic research reviews and meta-analyses” (Lesley, Floyd, & Oermann, 2002, p. 229).^[2] Its purpose, like other question refinement methods, is to help you organize, prioritize, and integrate material into a workable research area—one that is interesting, answerable, feasible, objective, scholarly, original, and clear.

Think about the themes you created in your summary table. How do they relate to one another? Within each topic, how do facts relate to one another? As you write down what you have, think about what you already know. What other related concepts do you not yet have information about? What relationships do you need to investigate further? Building a conceptual map should help you understand what you already know, what you need to learn next, and how you can organize a literature review.

This technique is illustrated in this YouTube video about concept mapping. You may want to indicate which concepts and relationships you’ve already found in your review and which ones you think might be true but haven’t found evidence of yet. Once you get a sense of how your concepts are related and which relationships are important to you, it’s time to revise your working question.

 Revising your working question

You should be revisiting your working question throughout the literature review process. As you continue to learn more about your topic, your question will become more specific and clearly worded. This is normal, and there is no way to shorten this process. Keep revising your question in order to ensure it will contribute something new to the literature on your topic, is relevant to your target population, and is feasible for you to conduct as a student project.

For example, perhaps your initial idea or interest is how to prevent student dropout. After an initial search of the relevant literature, you realize the topic of student dropout is too broad to adequately cover in the time you have to do your project. You decide to narrow your focus to causes of dropout. After reading some articles on the causes of dropout, you further narrow your search to the influence of student risk factors on dropout. A potential research question might then be, “What student risk factors are associated with dropout in Canada?” You would then need to return to the literature to find more specific studies related to the variables in this question (e.g. dropout, students, risk). You might even add the counterfactual (resilience) to get a better sense of the issue.

Similarly, after an initial literature search for a broad topic such as school performance or grades, examples of a narrow research question might be:

• “To what extent does parental involvement in children’s education relate to school performance over the course of the early grades?”
• “Do parental involvement levels differ by family social, demographic, and contextual characteristics?”
• “What forms of parent involvement are most highly correlated with children’s outcomes? What factors might influence the extent of parental involvement?” (Early Childhood Longitudinal Program, 2011).^[3]

In either case, your literature search, working question, and understanding of the topic are constantly changing as your knowledge of the topic deepens. A literature review is an iterative process, one that stops, starts, and loops back on itself multiple times before completion. As research is a practice behaviour of educators, you should apply the same type of critical reflection to your inquiry as you would to your practice.