Hi,
I am now a month thorugh my PhD and I think it is the right time to begin my literature survey (I am aware it will build up and change in next few years). I was talking to my colleague and I found out that he is planning to read 1400 articles. I have to admit that such a high number surprised me a bit and it made me wonder whether I should focus rather on quality than quality of publications.
Hence I have a question to you all. What is the best method for literature survey? What approaches have you taken while starting your PhD? What would be your advice?
Thank you :)
A.

I definitely never set a certain number of articles to read - I just read what interested me and went from there. Eventually you learn the key papers and people in your field, so you don't need to read everything to find out what's going on.

Thank you TreeofLife.
So, as I understand, you did not have any specific method for search and log of the articles you have read?
Thanks,
A.

I just put everything in Mendeley and highlighted interesting bits and made notes if needed. For searching articles I just used google scholar or Web of Science.

Hi AgaK,

I was pulled up in my viva for not clearly detailing the systemic review process used to determine the content of my review of literature chapters, so that the reader could see how my findings added to what was already known regarding my subject.

Based on my personal experience, my advice would be to identify your key search terms, which are usually determined by your research questions/aims/objectives, and limit the content of your review of literature chapter/s to these areas. This includes using the search terms in combination with one another, including any synonyms/variations.

All the best,
RLD

Yes I think it's probably subject specific - I'm in biology and we don't really do systematic reviews like RLD1984 is describing. I've never heard of this being addressed in a viva for biology.

In my field, some people do systematic literature reviews while others do more narrative-type reviews, where the focus is more on giving a sort of guided tour of the major works and themes. I'm doing the latter type, but if yours is going to be a systematic review, I would recommend looking for published papers with that type of review, to see the sort of detail they give - in my topic there are quite a few of these reviews published, and they tend to set out things like which databases and keywords were used, how they sorted through the abstracts looking for appropriate papers, how many papers they started and ended up with, and so on.

Hi TreeofLife and chickpea,

To be honest, they are not a requirement in my field, but nonetheless it's what the examiners wanted. I would have described my original approach as a narrative type review.