Some time ago, I was discussing with a colleague about a review I was writing at that moment. I mentioned that I estimated I had 20 hours of work left to do before submitting and her jaw dropped. She immediately asked me how is it possible to estimate my timing like that when writing a review. And I answered by outlining my workflow. As I didn’t know that my workflow could help others until I had this discussion with my colleague, I decided I should write it down because others might find it useful, too.
This article is for those of you who are interested in learning how to organize yourselves while writing demanding pieces like a review or a book chapter that require extensive research and to be delivered on a deadline. Although you have probably been asked to write a review or book chapter because you are an expert on a topic, it is unrealistic to think that you are aware of all the existing literature on a topic or as deeply as it is required to write a complete and insightful piece. Also, you will most likely find that you will need to touch an aspect of the literature you aren’t particularly familiar with because citing it will make the story you want to write more complete. In other words, it usually doesn’t matter how much of an expert you are on a topic, if you have to write a review you need to study up!
Below I outline a bunch of time-saving tips that work really well for me when I need to study before writing a review. It’s important to emphasize here that you should separate your studying from your writing completely to increase efficiency. I also highlight certain time-wasters you should avoid when you study before writing.
Step 1: Really know what you want to write about
This might sound way too obvious but it isn’t. I can’t count the times that I started reading a review because I thought the title or the abstract were interesting only to find myself reading something entirely different to what advertised. This happens because the authors have thought of a topic but are confronted with a massive amount of literature on a certain aspect of it and they don’t know how to handle it. As a result they provide way too much information about a small part of their topic, and therefore lose focus and end up with an unbalanced piece that doesn’t fit the title and bears great resemblance to other reviews.
In order to know what you want to write about you need to look deeply into the reviews that are already written on the topic (if any). If you find too many, especially from the last 5 years then switch topics. Add a twist that nobody else has added before. Write about something you find interesting. Don’t be afraid to write about something nobody has ever written before. A review is a nice means of proposing fresh perspectives and concepts.
Step 2: If you haven’t done so already, read reviews adjacent to your topic of choice
This will give you a good idea of what is known in a field especially for the parts of your review you aren’t so familiar with. Once you have this information locked in your mind, make an outline of your review. Decide how many sections you’ll have and which topics you will research and write bullet points for each. This might change a bit while you are gathering information, but it is important that you do not deviate much from it. This outline will bring you back on track when you start going deep into the literature.
Step 3: Make a list of all the terms you will look up on your favorite search engine
Search through them methodically and cross them out once you feel you have read enough on a topic. It sometimes happens that you search for a term and you get many thousands of results back. This means that you need to refine your search to have a chance of actually looking at a decent chunk of the literature around a specific topic. I find helpful to make a note how many results my searches returned and how many of them I actually checked. This comes in handy while writing because I can adjust my tone of confidence when I want to say how much is known on a certain topic. For instance if a search term returned 10 results and I look at all of them, I can easily say there is little known on the matter. If I get 16,446 results for a search term I can never be certain that a relevant article I ought to have cited wasn’t somewhere in the haystack.
Step 4: Choose systematically the papers you will read and cite
I choose papers based on their title initially and I decide if they are relevant to my topic based on the abstract. I do sometimes need to look deeper to decide but I allow myself a certain amount of time per paper before I make up my mind. You are allowed to change your mind once you actually read the paper but letting yourself read one single paper for far too long or reading without a method is TIME WASTER NUMBER 1 in review writing. You need to be fast in selecting papers and avoid reading too widely or too deeply thereby losing your focus. During this step I find that going back to my review outline puts me back on track if I stumble upon a paper that gets me thinking too long if it is a good fit or not.
Step 5: Ensure that the relevant papers you decided you’ll cite can be found again easily when you start writing
This is of outmost importance as trying to remember and re-discovering that paper you thought was interesting is TIME WASTER NUMBER 2. When I find a paper I decide I will cite, I import the citation and throw it in a citation manager. More importantly, I make a little note in a notebook with the information of the paper I thought was relevant and the citation so that I can find it immediately in my citation manager while I am writing. I find that making a note for each paper in a notebook engages the content of the paper better in my mind than typing out a note. Also, I like to make little extra notes for each paper to help me put it quickly into one of my sections while writing. A bit of color coding will work miracles in navigating quickly through your notes. Also, if you come up with any connections between your papers or any comment you’d like to make while summarizing findings write it down otherwise you’ll forget by the time you start writing your review. Adding a bit of perspective between paper summaries will make your text easier to follow and definitely more interesting.
Step 6: You are ready to start the actual writing!
Do not panic if you have spent most of your time studying. If you have even a bit of writing experience then having the papers you’ll cite so well organized will make it a piece of cake. If you are however a writing novice you will need to allocate a bit of extra time to the actual text composing. Make sure there is no or only little time between the end of your studying and the beginning of the actual review writing. Having the impressions of the papers you read fresh in your mind will make you much faster in composing your text. My rule of thumb is that I need triple the time to study than write and once I am satisfied with my studying, I start writing immediately.
That’s it! So, if you liked my suggestions, next time you have a review or a book chapter to write, start by organizing the information you need. To avoid becoming time-anxious, start early enough. Worst case scenario, you’ll be ready well before your deadline.
Hope this helps!
If you have any tips of you own invention that help you go through writing reviews and book chapters, feel free to post them in the comment section. Any other comments are welcome, too!
