You have enrolled for your PhD programme, and you have heard a term Literature Review. What is it? You will be told about this term. Reading lots of journal articles pertaining to your research area, analysing them, and writing what you perceive in your own style. It sounds very challenging, and only a few Universities provide complete guidance on literature review. You can get rid of literature review headaches if you follow the following tips. 

Choose a Topic
Before starting a PhD marathon you should prepare yourself mentally. You need to set goals and strategies how you are going to implement them. Think about expected challenges and how you can cope with them. Moving onto the stage of choosing a topic, you should decide a topic as quickly as you can. If you take long time pondering over a topic, other scholars may work on the same idea in the meantime. Check out whether the topic that you have chosen for is interesting to you or not. Will you be able to develop ideas for further beneficial research? What are well-defined issues in your chosen area? What are important aspects that readers will be interested in knowing?

Search the Literature
You need to find research papers relevant to your research area. You must ensure that the material you are referring to your research is not older than five years. Use a variety of resources such as books, journals, theses, and reports to dive into existing research. Establish a better terminology to develop keywords that will help you get better and relevant studies.
Set a specific time frame that you will devote in conducting research. It usually should not be over three weeks. Use software tools like Mendeley and Sente to organise your research work and annotations.  
Note down approaches, limitations, and conclusions of existing research work. This will help you track gaps and ideas to expand research to minimize the gaps. 

Reading
Now you have an avalanche of articles and research papers. The next step is to read them thoroughly. It’s not easy to remember all important points at the time of writing literature review so you should take some notes on them. Increase your reading speed. You should mark keywords at the time of reading that can be quickly overviewed at the writing stage. Highlight main phrases and ideas, facts, figures, and statistics. Write down points in your own language that could be easily remembered at the end of each chapter/ article, you should make summaries in your own words that can stay in your memory. 

Writing
Finally you have reviewed all existing research papers and made notes. Having read literature, you have a rough idea what you are going to write in literature review. You have to develop your own academic voice. Develop a conceptual scheme that will help you to decide directions from starting to end. You should read some PhD writing books that guide to write effectively and quickly. Your literature review should particularly involve framing arguments and questions of your research. It should also be written from your own perspective. However, it should show some development and advantages too. 

Improvement
Take feedback from your advisors. Work on the tips to rectify your errors. However, you should also review and edit your own work once before taking your advisor’s opinions. You will get a feedback how you can write more professionally.