comparison is the thief of joy

 

I cannot give you subject specific guidance as to what should go into you PhD because that is your job alongside guidance from your supervisor. I will however tackle something that is a common feature of all PhD’s: the literature review section.

practical aspects

The type of literature review you will be expected to do will depend on your discipline. Whether you need to do a systematic review, using ‘Boolean’ search techniques (that is searching databases with keywords and specific modifiers such as ‘AND’ ‘OR’ ‘WITH’) or your discipline uses the ‘snowball method’ of essentially starting with core texts and looking up the footnote references, and then the references in that text and so on), you can ask your subject librarian to take you through the preferred method of conducting a literature review in your discipline. You can also Google these different techniques and there should be training courses offered by your graduate schools which point out the pros and cons of these different approaches. You probably will use a combination of these methods throughout your PhD.

If you want a more detailed step-by-step guide to executing the literature review, I have a specific stand alone module available to purchase in the shop which takes you through it.

emotional aspects

When we come to the literature review aspect of our writing project, we can hit an emotional stumbling block. This is probably the first piece of writing you might be expected to produce. Whether your discipline requires a specific section on literature review, or by convention you set out the wider field in the first part of each chapter to situate your contribution (or both), the literature review element can make us want to turn way from writing.

Why is the literature review so tough?

To begin with, it is the first bit of writing you do for your supervisor and this provokes anxiety about how you might be judged. Remember we have to be confident in our self belief that we can do this PhD, and this might be one of the things that chips away at the confidence. When you are doing the literature review you are starting to compare your work to other experienced and published academics. Never before as a student would you have done this. It is unfair to compare yourself in this way, and you may be in the habit of comparing yourself unfavourably. How can you, a student, possibly be as good as the academics writing papers and publishing for 30 years?

Well you are still learning. You are not meant to be. This does not mean you cannot do a PhD, of course you can.

Nonetheless, the literature review can elicit feelings of imposter syndrome or second guessing whether you have anything useful to say, or indeed if you are capable of executing it.

This is a pretty normal part of the PhD writing process, so acknowledge it, but resist the urge to turn from writing back to research. It may make you feel better to know that established academic writers also regularly feel this way when starting the literature review aspect of their paper.

If you feel the urge to go back to research instead of writing the literature review, what you are doing is going back to the comfortable information gathering part of the PhD process where you are judge and jury on someone else’s contribution. This way you avoid finishing your own chapter and being faced with a similar judgment.

You can’t know all the things, or read all the things. Even in 3 years, even in a PhD. There will be, at this stage, gaps in your knowledge. You are learning. You are in the process, through writing, of finding out what they are. 

Keep going.

TODAY I WILL…

  • Go to my task list to see what I am doing today;

  • Write for 2 hours minimum on a writing project;

  • Continue to write (in my scheduled slots) until I have produced my shitty first draft without editing or looking up further research.