One thing that you can try for your literature review, is to use index cards. Don’t use them for the summary of all the author’s details. Instead, use them to create a map of what key concepts the author brings to the table, what theory they use or develop to explain their ideas, and what the main thrust of their argument is. This is something that my professors called “the story of the story”. In formal terms it is called “meta-analysis”.
The difficulty that most graduate students have with a literature review is that they want to tell the story of the author’s article or book. Then they want to string the stories together in what is generally an arbitrary order; it could be historical or it could be alphabetical. Both are arbitrary in the sense that they do NOT represent an organized grouping of theoretical ideas.
What you want to do is develop a fairly simple typology. For example, if you were looking at the insurgency literature, you might find that there were four schools of thought: A “search and destroy” old school (pre-19790) counter-insurgency theory, a “hearts and minds” theory, of which Petraeus FM-3-24 would be one of the more recent incarnations, a hybrid forces approach, and a fourth or fifth generation warfare approach. If you can work out what the main theoretical groupings of authors are, then you can summarize on an index card how each author approaches the problem, where they fit in the typology, what are the basic strengths and weaknesses of their approach, and what their original contribution is. All of this is a meta-analysis, which will drive an argument.
If you take this approach, you will produce a superior literature review. Anyone who reads your literature review will get a very powerful overview of the field. Doing this kind of literature review requires more thinking about what it is you are actually doing than just sitting down and grinding it out. If you follow this kind of approach, then your literature review will be a road map of your chosen area of study.
Sites like GetHomeworkDone.com can help you write good literature reviews from scratch or even proofread what you’ve written before submitting it. You can order yours using this link.
