There are many ways of doing a literature review, but reading a couple of papers that you already know about is not one of them.
Your literature review for your thesis should be structured – in other words you should follow a plan which you describe in sufficient detail for someone else to be able to repeat exactly what you did. You will see people talking about systematic reviews. These are a particular type of structured review, which almost always involve teams of researchers. Otherwise, the rules are similar.
In broad terms you need to think about
- your aim
- keywords that you might use
- authors that you might expect to find
- inclusion and exclusion criteria
- Where you will do the searching
- how you will show the results of your search
- how you will interpret the results of your search
There are several on-line resources to help.
PRISMA This is the gold standard way of reporting the search and identifying literature
PRISMA checklist PRISMA flow diagram
AMEE Guide 94 a good practical guide to how to go about doing a systematic review – remember the rules are similar.
Twelve Tips for undertaking a focussed review is shorter, and simpler to read, but relates to a focussed review. You probably will not want to follow all of the tips (8 and 9 for instance), but the paper is helpful.
Moving beyond effectiveness– this is a booklet where they have collected a number of papers about different ways of analysing papers. Chapters 5 and 9 are my favourites
The webinar Please look at this presentation before the webinar Powerpoint MP4
The download of the webinar is available here
David Taylor's homepage 