Literature reviews - keeping them manageable

It can be overwhelming if, on preparing for a report or paper on a new topic, one looks up the available literature and finds several hundred or thousand papers on a similar theme. Here's what I do to keep the literature assessed relevant and manageable. It might have some merit.

Before I start I pose the basic research questions, and split the question several ways according to likely avenues of interest. Then I look at the probable structural contents of my research paper - recall that I previously mentioned that many papers take a rough form of

{Questions / importance / lit review / plan / theory / specification / empirical specification / inputs / outputs / interpretation / conclusion}

If the questions have been specified, then we may have a rough idea of the importance, theory, specification, empirical specification, and inputs, so these can be noted down in a sentence each.

Then comes the literature survey. Academics and students often have access to university libraries or online literature sources such as Science Direct or Google Scholar (the last being free), and these can be used to find relevant literature. Let's say that there are two hundred papers whose titles are a bit like the paper's title. We can immediately abandon those whose questions asked are entirely different from ours, and we can also abandon those which are not much the same as ours in the content of most of the structural parts. So if our paper is empirical with a specification, empirical method, inputs, and so on, we might want to jettison papers which are exclusively theoretical.

Hopefully, this will bring the size of the literature down to a reasonable size, numbering in the dozens. The contents of each of the papers can then be compared to each other, perhaps in a grid on paper or in one's mind against the structural elements. Many papers agree on all of the contents except for the data input used, for example, so these papers will show a high degree of similarity in the grid. The grid organisation which is observed after all the papers have been reviewed should lend itself to an overall literature review.

The above procedure is mechanical, and may replicate the more intuitive approach used when someone is completely familiar with the literature and so can draw up a literature review almost without thinking. The procedure also has an advantage that it encourages the author to learn new theoretical and analytical tools, if they repeatedly occur in the literature, which will be relatively few in number by construction.