Purpose of this Article
The literature review is the mountain upon which many doctoral dreams die. If you speak to once dissertation writers who "stopped" pursuing their doctoral degrees, you'll rarely hear that they stopped during data collection, data analysis, or in writing their final chapters. Likewise, you'll rarely hear of a doctoral student that successfully wrote their opening chapters, including their literature review, only to lose steam when finalizing their data collection plans. Thus, the literature review is a dangerous place to get stuck – as many never get unstuck.
Most likely, the challenges you face in the literature review are NOT what you think they are! This article aims to help students who are experiencing writing symptoms that necessitate a "pause" in their writing. So, if you find you are experiencing one of the following, it's time to put away the keyboard and read this article.
Symptoms of impending literature review disaster include:
- I'm writing the same thing over and over again;
- I'm confused about where something goes in my literature review; and
- I don't know what to write.
If you have had any of the above feelings, this article is for you!
How should I organize my dissertation's literature review?
The prerequisite item to organize your literature review is your study's purpose statement (or "aim"). The purpose statement lays out the who, what, when, where, and how of your research. If you have not yet written one, it's time to write it! I have an informative,
step-by-step video here that can help with that.
The purpose statement functions as a compass pointing to the True North of your study. Any time you feel confused in your dissertation process, the purpose statement is a great place to which to return. Let's look at an example purpose statement to see what structure it offers your literature review:
The purpose of this qualitative case study is to explore the leadership approaches of CEOs in their first five years at publicly held, top-ten Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. in 2022.
Notice that the purpose statement provides the exact headings for the literature review:
The purpose of this qualitative case study is to explore the leadership approaches of CEOs in their first five years at publicly held, top-ten Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. in 2022.
Accordingly, the main headings might be:
- Leadership Approaches
- Chief Executive Officers (CEOs)
- Publicly-Held, Top-Ten Fortune 500 Companies.
This process of deriving one's literature review headings from the purpose statement works well in several ways. First, since the purpose statement has all of the elements required to understand the gist of what is being studied, where (or with whom) it's being studied, and how it's being studied, all the major areas of knowledge or theory present! Think about your own purpose statement: if you adopted the major "nouns" of your purpose statement as the main headings of your lit review, could any "missing" topics be organized "under" these main headings as subheadings? Indeed, the answer is, 95% of the time, yes!
Another way that this process works well is that it allows for easy writing. Everything about leadership, leadership theory, and leadership approaches end up under one heading. All research about CEOs ends up in its own heading. The research about those Fortune 500 companies ends up in their own heading too. Notice how beneficial this is: There is little or no chance that topics will crisscross or entangle with one another. Have you ever had this feeling while writing like "I feel like I am talking about too many things at the same time?" Well, this strategy removes that possibility entirely.
Should each main section of the literature review be by chronology or by theme?
