1.1: How to Use This Workbook

The Process of Research

"...we don’t know what we’re going to find, we don’t know what we’re gonna solve...discover, but we’re going to get in the water."
(graduate student participant, as cited in Droog et al. 2024, p. 834).

I was staring at a mind-numbingly large number of printed articles, strewn over my desk, with even more PDF files on my monitor. I was trying to get back to a manuscript that I'd set aside for several months to focus on my job. Now, confronted with all these sources, my eyes blurred. I couldn't remember which articles I'd printed nor which I'd read. And although I was sure there was some reason I'd chosen these articles, now I couldn't see how they related.

My anxiety rose, viscerally, in my body, as a pillar of heat coursing upwards from my churning belly, through my racing heart, shortening my breath and dizzying my head. The more I looked at all these sources, the more my vision blurred.

As an academic librarian, I'd been mentoring graduate students for years on their research. I'd confidently shown them how to use keywords in databases to find scholarly citations. I'd empathized when they cried real tears in my office about their sense of overwhelm during their dissertations. But here I was, realizing I had no idea what to do with the articles I'd found. I had no idea how to stay organized in a process with starts and stops, as work and life got in the way.

This workbook is what I wish I'd had - a road map to walk with you through your literature review by demystifying the process and journeying alongside you.

My Promise to You

My promise to you:
This workbook will save you time and improve your emotional reactions to your research by providing stepping stones through the literature review process. It'll help you go down fewer rabbit holes, know what steps to take, and who can give you more support and direction.

Whether you’re working on a class assignment, your dissertation, or planning a research project, this workbook provides the practical steps to doing a literature review using the metaphor of stepping stones along a path. The process often feels daunting and can bring forth an array of emotions. Given how complicated research is, this is to be expected, and you’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed.

This book is meant to be used as you go through the process of your literature review, rather than being read ahead of time. Even if you already have a specific topic in mind, you'll get the most out of the book if you work your way through the book from the beginning: the process is as important as the end result. Not only will this process ultimately save you time in the long run and strengthen your literature review, but it will also decrease your stress.

Create an Interactive Workbook

I highly recommend that you use this workbook in a tangible way. Make it yours and interact with the exercises, rather than just reading. You can do this however works for you. For example:

• Print PDFs of the chapters and store them in a binder that you can write in and add pages as needed
• Download PDFs of the chapters and use a tablet's stylus to draw & write directly in the PDFs. Or download to a computer and type into the PDFs. There are a few times I'll suggest you draw or doodle, so you could do that on your computer, or draw it on paper and then take a photo to upload to the folder where you're saving the PDFs.

What to Expect

This workbook is divided into five major units, plus this intro & the conclusion: Unit 2: Check-In and Road Map, Unit 3: Develop your Topic, Unit 4: Find Citations, Unit 5: Find Patterns, and Unit 6: Dive Deeper. Within each unit are chapters that each focus on a particular step of the process; a concrete example is used throughout to break the process of research into specific steps, with explanations of why each step is important and how it leads to your literature review. Thus, you can see how I move from the beginning of the process to the end with the same example. At each step, you’ll complete an activity based on your topic. Throughout, I’ll point out times to check in with yourself, your road map, and with others to create a support system. Therefore, there is more space for you to engage with your topic and with the literature, rather than lots of words from me.

The workbook is meant to be used as you go through the process of doing your literature review.

Therefore, as we go through the workbook, I'll provide time lines for how long you should consider budgeting for each stage, depending on whether you're working on a course assignment, dissertation, or publication. Overall, the research will take a minimum of several weeks or a couple months for a course assignment, or several months for a dissertation.

In unit 2, we focus on you. Why are you writing a literature review? What are your values and background? How does who you are relate to research? This creates a strong foundation of internal support that you can come back to when the research becomes overwhelming. We'll also briefly touch on the basics of what a literature review is and create a road map for your research.

In unit 3, we'll develop your topic. This is where I’ll help you find sources for the literature review and showcase how those sources also help you refine your topic and adjust your searches for better results. Therefore, to help you through this puzzling iterative process, we'll explore your interests to lead towards a topic. I'll show you how and why to do simple, broad scoping searches. In chapter 5, we’ll refine your topic using your broad search results and some specific framing questions.

In unit 4, we'll use your initial topic interests to start finding some citations. I'll go through how to perform advanced, efficient, and effective searches. We'll conclude this unit by considering how to evaluate the citations you’re finding in your searches.

In unit 5, I provide metaphors and activities to dive deeply into what a literature is and the purpose of writing one. With that understanding, we'll break down the best steps to scan and read your sources within the context of your topic. You'll learn how to take notes in a way that helps you see patterns in the literature you've found. This will help you start to synthesize.

In unit 6, we'll go through advanced techniques for finding specific types of sources. By this point, you'll have the majority of your sources and be able to articulate the flow of the conversation of research on your topic.

In unit 7, we conclude with a reflection about the journey through the steps you’ve just taken and what’s next for you to start writing your literature review.