Managing Writing & Research

On Managing the Writing and Research Process:

Write Early and Often: Don’t wait until all research is done to start writing. Writing is a form of thinking; it helps clarify your ideas. Begin drafting chapters like the literature review and methodology early.

Create a Realistic Timeline: Work backward from your target defense date to build a schedule with milestones for each chapter. Build in buffer time for unexpected delays.

Prioritize Self-Care: The dissertation is a marathon. Regular sleep, exercise, nutrition, and hobbies are not distractions; they are essential for sustaining long-term intellectual effort.

3. Literature Review Planning

Prior to, during, and after you have settled on your general field of interest, you should be seeking out the literature to enable to be on a journey of discovery. The focus throughout this course should be on synthesizing the evidence and claims of the existing literature through a review of the literature.

As shared previously, conduct an initial literature search before you finalize your general field of interest. This will help you to feel more confident in moving forward. Once your general field of interest is approved by the Dissertation Supervisor (see previous admin update), you will continue to seek out more literature to demonstrate that you have a deep and wide knowledge of your selected field.

How should you focus your literature search?  Where do you begin?

  1. Watch the videos prepared by our Education librarian, Nancy O’Brien. These provide a variety of tips on how to effectively use the library’s online databases and search tools.
  2. Identify your purpose and questions that you want the literature to answer, such as those previously shared in early admin updates: (definitions, theories, debates, history and evolution of the field, demographics and other variables investigated, interventions or practices investigated, challenges, benefits, critiques, etc.).
  3. Avoid seeking out only answers or theories that you want to find or discuss.
  4. Consider the publication dates of your sources, especially in fields that have experienced recent and/or incremental change and how the publication dates might impact how you refer to and organize your findings.

Finding and Selecting References

  • In the library and on the Library Web site. Search for journal articles and e-books that are behind paywalls on the web. See also our library resources page.
  • On the web. Be sure to supplement a general web search with Google Scholar. Use the settings in Google Scholar to connect to the University of Illinois library. Not only does this narrow your search to scholarly articles and books. It has useful information about how widely a work and an author has been cited and their more recent publications. However, be careful with this information—quantity of citations does not necessarily mean quality or relevance to your interests. Less cited works may be very good or highly relevant.
  • Read review articles. Look for review articles that address your topic or special field, because these will probably reference key works from the general field as well.
  • Follow the gossip! When you find an article or book that you really like, or that you find very helpful, look at who this author is citing. If their work is helpful, they will probably have a good eye for things that you will also find helpful. Look out particularly for citations that may be obscure and not necessarily popular in the sense of garnering a large number of citations. Think of academic writing as a kind of gossip network. Who is talking about whom?
  • Be careful not to cherry-pick the articles that say what you want to hear. The best work centers around critical dialogue. You should carefully seek out alternative perspectives and approaches. Without taking a stance yourself (at least, not in the literature review), contrast different points of view and the issues at stake. Your role here is to map the debates and arguments in the literature, highlighting the key issues at stake without (yet!) taking sides.

Building Your Research Diary and Bibliography

A systematic approach to managing your doctoral research.

Core Principle: Two Integrated Tools

An effective system relies on two primary artifacts working together: a Research Diary for knowledge synthesis and a Bibliographical Database for source management.

1. The Research Diary (Your Knowledge Hub)

This is your private, evolving space for capturing ideas, notes, and connections.

  • Tool Options:
    • Simple: A single Word or Google Doc.
    • Advanced: Dedicated note-taking apps like Obsidian, Notion, or Scrivener for better organization and linking.
  • How to Structure It:
    • Reverse Chronological Order: Date each entry, with the latest at the top.
    • Golden Rule – Distinguish Your Ideas: Always clearly separate your original thoughts from source notes. Use [square brackets], a different text color, or a dedicated column.
    • Include:
      • Notes from readings (always with page numbers).
      • Your reflections and emerging arguments.
      • Copied sections from literature reviews or proposals.
  • How to Find Things Again (Findability):
    • Use Hashtags: Tag concepts (e.g., #neo-colonialism, #mixed-methods). Maintain an index of these tags.
    • Integrate Citations: Insert formatted citations (e.g., (Smith, 2020)) directly from your bibliographical database.
    • Search: The power of a single document is the ability to search across all your work instantly.
    • If you are utilizing your source library (next), the following apps are searchable by subject, etc.

2. The Bibliographical Database (Your Source Library)

This is your curated library of all sources you engage with.

  • Tool Recommendation: Use a reference manager like Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote.
  • Best Practices:
    • Be Meticulous: Import complete citation data and attach PDFs or source links immediately.
    • Important – Always save your pdfs in 1 folder, otherwise your download folder will be a mess.
    • Enrich with Notes: Copy your summarized notes from your Research Diary into the “notes” field of each source in your database. This creates a rich summary for each reference.

3. Citation Styles

Choose a discipline-appropriate style (APA, MLA, Chicago) and use it consistently throughout your program. APA is our standard. If you choose another, inform your advisors and reviewers of your choice.

Action Items

  1. Decide & Set Up: Choose your tools (e.g., Obsidian for my diary, Zotero for my database) and set them up.
  2. Reflect & Describe: In the comments, describe your system. How will it help you? How might you improve it in the future?

4. Annotated Bibliography

You are strongly advised to maintain an annotated bibliography. These should be the references that you consider to be the most important in the general field (to start off with) that you will in turn use within your General Field literature review. Note that you will also add entries for your special field examination in Course 2, so keep specialized works you might come across for then.  Keep track of the methodologies and data collection strategies as well, as those will become useful as you advance to Course 3.

​Purpose

The purpose of an annotated bibliography is to demonstrate that you can select the key publications of scholars who have also addressed the topic of your general field and eventually dissertation and who have addressed your general field focus and/or tentative research questions. This is an indicator of the sense you have gained of the shape of the general field, that you can cite key references appropriately and synthesize them succinctly. Your commentary will demonstrate that you can make astute synthesis and analysis of each publication, and connect publications in a way that is indicative of your understanding of the shape of the general field.

Web Tips

When writing your Annotated Bibliography entries, things to consider include:

  • In your literature review, you will be expected to speak in the voice of the literature. What are the claims being made?
  • Also, in your LR, you’ll be expected to elaborate on the context of the study and the evidence that led to the claim – by adding this to your annotated bibliography entry, you make it much easier to construct your literature review
  • The concepts and theory used by the scholar(s) who authored the book or article.
  • Main empirical findings, if the work is based on empirical study.
  • The methodology of the work, and how this has been usefully insightful in this case. Again, this will assist with providing context and elaboration of what led to the evidence and/or claims.
  • The significance of the work in terms of its impact on the academic field, and the frequency with which it is cited. (Though of course, some works you may want to argue are important in their implications for the whole field, even if not widely known or cited.)
  • Practical applications and real-world consequences, actual or potential. Creative and innovative extensions

Applying your Annotated Bibliography to your Literature Review

As a word of caution, do not expect to copy and paste and/or reference one source per paragraph in your literature review. Be sure to still synthesize a diversity of sources, in the voice of the literature. You may find that you need to revisit an article as you write your literature review. But maintaining and leveraging your annotated bibliography can help you with time management and recall of what you have read. It can also help you group sources into themes. This should be done in concert with your tags and what you have done to organize your sources in your bibliographical database.

5. General Field Literature Review – Getting Started

This document outlines the purpose, philosophy, and process for a doctoral seminar course designed to develop the General Field Literature Review section of a dissertation.

The Genre of Review

  1. Purpose: The review serves as a qualifying exam to demonstrate deep understanding of the candidate’s general field and its relation to a tentative research question. It is intended to be the foundation for Chapter 2 of the dissertation and should be comprehensive enough to “teach a 101 course” on the subject.
  2. The Genre: A review is defined as a delicate balance between fairly representing the work of other scholars for an unfamiliar audience and weaving in the writer’s own interpretive voice, while clearly separating the two.
  3. Types of Reviews:
    • Review Magazines (e.g., London Review of Books): Presented as examples of masterful writing but noted as being more opinionated and a different genre from a scholarly literature review.
    • Review Articles: Academic articles that provide an overview of a thematic area. A subset is meta-analysis, which aggregates quantitative results. They are useful entry points but are notorious for being highly cited without containing original research.
    • Literature Review (for this course): Distinct from a review article; its goal is to demonstrate knowledge mastery of a coherent body of literature, not just tackle a single question.
  4. Expectations for the Candidate’s Review:
    • Summarize and synthesize the field to show wide reading and deep understanding.
    • Make a case: Use the literature to foreshadow important questions, potential answers, alternative perspectives, and gaps.
    • Remain faithful to the literature’s multiple voices, including both consensus and disagreements.
    • Provide brief context for each cited work so a reader can understand its thrust without having read it.
    • Critically analyze the works by asking: How is evidence provided? What premises are claims based on?

Making a Case: The instruction to “make a case” is crucial but potentially ambiguous. It should be clarified that this does not mean arguing a personal opinion, but rather building a scholarly argument based on the literature about the state of the field and where it needs to go next.

Thematic Organization: A common weakness in early drafts is a “source-by-source” summary (Author A says… Author B says…). The document could more forcefully stress the need to organize the review thematically or conceptually rather than chronologically or by author.

Distinguish Synthesis from Summary: While you are able to do both in your literature review, it good to push toward synthesis more than summary of the literature.

  • Summary: What the literature says (recapping findings).
  • Synthesis: What it means (connecting different studies to show trends, debates, and the overall conversation).

Evidence Based Writing

The core principle of an evidence-based literature review is to let “the field speak, not you.” Its purpose is to marshal the collective intelligence and state-of-the-art knowledge of experts, not to present your own opinions.

A literature review must analyze two layers of evidence:

  1. The evidence within each source: Analyze the basis (empirical, conceptual, or theoretical) for each work’s claims, don’t just describe them.
  2. The evidence across the field: Identify points of general agreement and significant disagreement among experts, which themselves are a form of high-level evidence.

To achieve this, the writer must:

  • Be analytical, not descriptive: Critically examine the literature’s collective voice.
  • Remove personal bias: Set aside prior knowledge, opinions, and passion. Your role is to report on what the literature says, not what you believe to be true.
  • Remain open-minded: Be prepared to discover challenging or unexpected findings and include the context in which certain claims are true or false.
  • Let the literature argue for you: Find sources that defend positions, rather than using your own voice to make arguments at this stage.

In essence, the literature review chapter is a disciplined exercise in learning what the field knows, separate from your own interpretive frame, which can be reserved for other parts of the dissertation.