A Dissertation Literature Review – How To Find A Good Template

Are you writing a dissertation literature review for the first time and don’t know how to structure it? Most dissertation literature reviews will follow the same format, and understanding what that is should help you write a dissertation that’s well organized. There are various sources online where you can learn how to structure you review, or simply copy the structure of an existing review.

Visit Databases

Online you’ll find databases that allow people to submit their dissertation literature reviews. You can scan through these databases and look at some examples. By doing this you’ll be able to see how other reviews are formatted. For the most part you’ll see that most reviews use a very similar template, but there are deviations. Depending on your writing style and topic these deviations from the norm could be useful to you.

Try finding review topics similar to your ones, because these might follow a specific format that you should also follow. If you find a database that’s large enough you’ll have access to even the most obscure of topics.

“How To” Websites

Online there are websites dedicated on teaching people how to do almost anything, and this includes formatting a dissertation literature review. Such websites will explain how to format the entire review, but more importantly why each formatting element is used. Knowing how to do something sometimes is not enough – you should also know why something needs to be done.

Some “how to” websites might even show you how to use a template on a word processors like MS Word. Such word processors have templates built into the software that you can load up. However, learning how to use these templates can be a little bit tricky if you have never done it before.

Templates Should Be Flexible

Make sure to find a template that suits your writing style, and will allow your work to be expressed in a way that you’ll be happy with. Some templates might be a little too constrictive for what you are trying to write, and you might struggle. That’s a bad case scenario because a template is supposed to help you write, not impede the flow of writing. The best templates are those that can be modified as you are writing, but the overall structure remains.