How To Write A Literature Review In A Research Paper In ONE Day

are you struggling to write the literature review to your research paper well in this video I'm going to walk you through step by step how I go about structuring and writing my literature review and we're really going to simplify it for you so that after watching this video you can go off and probably in one day structure everything and write everything it really doesn't have to be that complicated to write the literature review I know a lot of people struggle with it but this video is going to show you how to do it more simply

so that you can go off finish the literature review and submit your paper so let's dive in now if you're new here my name iskovic and I run academic English now where I help PhD students and researchers regularly publish research papers in top journals in the field and if you're enjoying this video then hit the like button and the Subscribe button so you don't miss future videos like that all right so what we're going to do is work backwards from you know a published paper and from a title of a published paper to show you

sort of the steps that you need to go through in order to structure a literature review in a research paper and by the way the same thing would apply to a PhD thesis it's just that it would be much longer right and you might be thinking okay but I I mean I I'm still writing the paper I don't have to take the paper published right well it's it's the same thing you're just looking at your aim right so you want to copy and paste the aim of your paper as the first thing in here I'm

just going to use the the title of the paper but you can use the aim of your paper because surely you already know what the aim is right and we're going to start working from the AIM now the easiest way to organize your literature review and write it in literally one day is to look at the main topics that are within your title or within the aim of your study right so I'm gonna list all the main topics below the title and we're going to try to organize the literature review around these topics right and

I'm for for the time being I'm just going to list them in no particular order and just as they come up in the title or in your aim right and I'll just then try to organize them but first i'm just going to list the titles right and so that would be the first one of course I could list them separately right and first talk about this concept of native speakerism and then English language teaching but like that would be too General like we want to dive in straight into into this right and then we've got

you know these native speakers in here as well let me copy and paste that right so that'll be our second main concept right and then we've got conferences right and plenary speakers right so copy and paste that and yeah these could be like two separate topics so again you could talk about conferences and the importance of conferences and then you could talk about plenary speakers right and that's probably what I'm gonna do um but these would be the main topics I don't really need to talk about anything else um I think in here right so

the first step to organize your literature review is just to list all the topics based off the aim of your research paper or based off the title if you're already invented the title right now that we've got the main topics we've kind of got to think like what is the most logical way of organizing them right what should I talk about first in the literature review and what should I talk about second now how do you do that the easiest way and usually the most logical is to go General to specific now I can't really

talk about conferences and plenary speakers first because conferences and plenary speakers aren't like really the main driving force of my topic the main driving force of my topic is this right native speakerism in English language teaching that's the main driving force right so it wouldn't make sense to talk about conferences and plenary speakers like conferences and plenary speakers are kind of like a sub topic like a more specific aspect of this issue of native speakerism right if that if that makes sense so what we're going to do is we're going to probably talk about this

first right and then we would want to talk about um conferences and I think we're going to talk about conference plenary speakers as one topic now what are we doing with this like native speakers right so this perhaps requires a little bit of knowledge of of the topic but it's it's very simple really so native speakerism you can kind of compare it to like let's say sexism or racism the main difference is that you know unlike racism which is based on you know someone's perceived belonging to uh to a given perceived race and all the

you know discrimination and negative stereotypes that go with that native speakerism is based off on or someone's belonging to you know someone being perceived as a native speaker of a given language right and all the Discrimination prejudices based with that when it comes to teaching English and native speakers are often seen as better teachers better models of the language better everything right so this is kind of you know do we talk about this first or do we talk about it within native speakers well probably I might need to first kind of address this issue of

you know kind of who a native speaker is in order to be able to talk about the issue of discrimination which is native speakerism right now once you've got these main topics right you want to list some subtopics in other words like what kind of stuff am I going to talk about well I probably need a definition right almost whatever you talk about right you you need some sort of a definition right in here we need to talk about like previous studies effect for example of native speakerism reasons for it right maybe right I'm just

kind of brainstorming right now you know but you but you get you get my point right you want to list like sort of sub topics that you're going to be talking about under each main topic right now one thing that people get wrong is that they say well but I can't review any literature because like my topic is very unique and no Studies have been conducted on it well that's true because that's the reason why you're doing your topic because it hasn't been done before but like what you want to do is like be looking

at the the broader picture a little bit so in my specific case nobody has talked about you know native speakerism when it comes to conference plenary speakers this has not been done before right so what I need to do here is I need to you know look at representation of uh you know women um people of color at conferences right and and I could look at conferences in in general uh you know but also as plenary speakers right and then I want to look at um other disciplines uh because no research in English language teaching

right right so if there's no research on this specific Topic in your field well that's amazing because you found like a huge research Gap that you can research forever basically right but you want to be looking at this topic of like conference plenary speakers and you know I'm looking broadly speaking at discrimination of a particular group of people right so you can do the same and you know look at discrimination of other groups of people at conferences and as plenary speakers in other disciplines right such as I don't know mathematics or physics or whatever else

it is right and then afterwards that brings you you know we're going to add it maybe as our Point um number four um research Gob plus aim right that's always comes the last right so the whole literature review builds to this right now let's look at how this was actually done in in this paper and we're gonna move down to um the literature review right and you can say you know that first we've got the concept of a native speaker right and we provide the definitions in here now the thing is that this this section

is a little bit long when it comes to to who a native speaker is because it's a fairly contentious issue right so if you've got a topic like that where like lots of researchers disagree how to for example Define it right and there is no consensus then you might want to spend a little bit more time discussing it because for our study it raises important issues in terms of the methodology right because what we did was to investigate the balance of plenary speakers and with the goal of whether there was disparity along the lines of

speakerhood right so we would basically kind of look at how many Native and non-native speakers there were at the conference but first we have to Define it but if people disagree in in our field how to define a native speaker well then we need to present that disagreement right in order to then be able to to have a definition that is working and we can use in our study and then we move on to the concept of native speakerism and Conference speaker representation right so first as almost always you need to define the concept right

and then we present the past research on this topic so basically you know the effect of native speakerism on English language teaching right and then you know notice this sentence there is no research basically on Native speakerism and conferences right or just like there's almost none or none literally right so what we do here is what I told you when we were structuring it well we're just gonna look at discrimination and bias at other conferences right we look at surgical conferences you know and there's a lot about um imbalance when it comes to females of

plenary speakers right and people of color and so on right so we also look at ethnic minorities among conference plenary speakers but notice that you know we can't look at Native and non-native speakers and we can't look at conferences in English language teaching because there is no research on it right so we want to look at you know the broader issue of discrimination and conferences in other scientific disciplines right and if that if that makes sense to kind of expand our literature review and we look at you know the reasons for this discrimination right at

conferences right and any potential explanations why this happens right and then we move on to the research Gap and and then the aim of this paper right if that makes sense so to sum up you know the way to structure your literature review and write it in literally like one day or a couple of hours is to look at the main topics of your research aim or of your title and write them down put them in the in the most logical order and then list any subtopics and then put them in the most logical order

right and then start writing now if you'd want some more personalized help publishing research papers in higher impact journals then schedule a free one-to-one consultation where we're going to identify your main challenges and what your goals are and then prepare a personalized action plan for you that will help you to achieve those goals and the link to book.311 consultation is right below this video