As with any research project, you should be tracking any and all searches you make for this literature review. Not only will this help you retrace your steps if you lose some of your research, it will also help you know what you have and have not searched, enabling you to move forward with your research at any time. 

You can track your searches with a basic table in a document, or even with a pen and paper. There are some notes you can give yourself to make the research process more streamlined. Consider giving yourself notes on the searches you make, such as if they were useful or if you didn’t find any usable literature. You can also suggest further keywords in your notes, if you find there are words that do not work particularly well.

Once you’ve finished the searches you decided on in the first steps of the process, you’ll need to decide how to organize the research within your paper. There are many different ways to organize your paper, depending on what you want to convey to your reader.

You could organize your literature:

• chronologically
• thematically
• by publisher
• another way that you decide is most appropriate

Not only will this decision help you organize your paper, which will be incredibly helpful, but it will form the argument you are trying to make and helps your reader understand the methodology you went through when compiling this literature review. 

The DU Library recommends Zotero as a tool that can greatly help you compile your resources.

See the Collect Your Resources tutorial on the following guide to learn how.