Organising Literature Review for Dissertation - an Untold Guide

There exist only a few words that strike the head of academic writers, and literature review is one of those words. It does not happen due to its pronunciation or spelling. It happens due to the work it requires from academic writers. Writing and organising literature review for dissertation are the two most daunting tasks when working on a dissertation. It requires you to study tons of scholarly papers published in your field and relate them to your dissertation topic.

However, students with a lack of organising skills just cannot find the proper way to compose the literature review section of their dissertation. Considering this, today’s post is all about guiding students in organising literature review for dissertation in the best possible manner. There will be a description of the top three ways. However, before moving on to those ways, let’s explain the meaning of literature review organisation.

What does it mean to organise a literature review?

A literature review is a survey of scholarly articles or papers published in your field. It is the collection of papers that are relevant to your research questions. So, it needs the proper organisation of the papers. Organisation means all the articles you have collected must follow a single principle. It is not about providing summaries of the research papers that you have collected one after the other. It requires you to move ahead in an organised way, following one particular style and method of organisation.

Ways to organise a literature review for a dissertation

After reading the information above, you have got a good idea of literature review and organising literature review in a dissertation. However, the main topic of today’s discussion is to discuss the ways to organise the literature review. Primarily, there are three ways to do this. A brief description of each way is as follows:

1. Chronological

The first and the most common way of organising a literature review for dissertation is the chronological way. It is mostly used for topics that are hot and have a long, long history of improvements over time. In this way of organising the literature review, you take the date of publication of the scholarly texts into consideration and describe them in order. You start the review by explaining the oldest paper and move on to the latest ones. Another way to organise the literature review using a chronological way is by looking at the history of the concept. If you are using this technique, then know that your literature review will have subsections containing the eras’ dates and other crucial information. Hence, it is all about the chronological way of organising the literature review for dissertation.

2. Thematic

The second way of organising literature review for dissertation is called thematic. Thematic reviews of the literature are organised around a topic or issue. It does not involve the progression of time or events related to your field. However, there could be a discussion on the progression of time if the topic requires it. Most of the time, the discussion is only on one topic. For example, the discussion is about “Harpoon Technology.” Now, you will find the literature review on this technology and organise it using a thematic way. It does not matter which paper is published first and which paper is published last. As a writer, your only concern is to discuss the topic in detail, and the whole of your review is going to be organised around this topic.

3. Methodological

The third way to organise the literature review is methodological. This method focuses on methods utilised by researchers in your field to study different topics. It usually does not have anything to do with the content of the papers. It only looks at the methods used and describes them in the literature review. By using this way, you can group the articles or papers that use the same methodology in the same category. It allows the readers to get a good review of the most used methods in your field to solve different issues.

Hence, these are the three ways to organise a literature review for dissertation. However, if you still have any doubts about any of these methods, you can ask for help from the best dissertation writing services in the UK. They can help you a lot in crafting your literature review in the way you want.

Conclusion

Conclusively, organising a literature review for dissertation is not an easy task. The reason is that it is not small blocks of information that you need to organise. These are the large chunks of information that are way more difficult to handle than you imagine. However, we have discussed the three ways to organise the literature review. Read the description of all those three ways and organise your literature review using any way.