Most graduate schools have specific formatting rules for your final dissertation document. You should be able to find these rules on the website. Schools differ in the amount of support and resources they provide to help you achieve these formatting specifics, however.

The last thing you want to be doing when you've just finished your dissertation is wrangling MS Word to put your page numbers horizontal on a landscape page and get your list of figures to update correctly. 

Read on for tips and a summary of my experience

Writing a literature review is daunting (hey, writing a dissertation is daunting!)

While dissertation formats vary between universities and disciplines, most (if not all) require a literature review.  

In this post I'll walk you through my process in developing an organization system that helped me write my dissertation literature review. It's a long post, but I wanted it all to be in one place for you so it's not broken up into different articles. 

First, I'll walk you through my back story in the dissertation literature review process, and describe my overall system of organization.

Then, I'll describe 2 methods to take you from reading articles to taking notes to organizing your notes into themes.

Lastly, I'll wrap up with thoughts on how to continue your literature review in a cohesive and transparent way.

All external links open in a new window.

Background photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash