What’s your actual workflow for writing a lit review from scratch?
My advisor just sent back my first lit review draft with “this reads like a list of summaries, not an argument”, which is accurate and not particularly helpful. So I’m rebuilding the whole approach and figured I’d share what I’m trying now and hear what actually works for other people.
Current process: I start with a broad question and collect 30-40 abstracts before reading anything fully. Then I group them thematically rather than chronologically. Only after that do I start reading in full and taking notes.
The part that used to break me was the transition from notes to actual prose. I’d end up with a giant document of quotes and summaries and couldn’t find the through-line. What helped was switching to writing directly in a tool called Lit͏ero, as it lets me bring in my PDFs and actually drafts from them, so the sources stay contextually tied to the writing rather than living in a separate notes file. The citations get handled automatically which means I’m not constantly switching contexts to check formatting.
What I still haven’t figured out: how to decide when a lit review is actually comprehensive enough vs. just getting longer. Feels like that threshold is different for every advisor.