FREE Research practice LESSON · Research practice
Map claims, not paper piles
Questions, assumptions, and disagreement
A literature review is a structured argument about what is known.
Begin with a precise question and decompose it into claims. For each source, record the population or system, intervention or mechanism, comparison, outcome, assumptions, and evidence. Link papers by support, contradiction, extension, or incompatible framing. This reveals whether a crowded topic contains real agreement or repeated measurements of different things.
Citation count is not evidential weight; methods and relevance determine what a source can support.
A summary can erase the boundary of a result.
Statements often travel farther than their experimental conditions. Preserve scope: version, dataset, time period, hardware, baseline strength, selection criteria, and uncertainty. Mark whether you are quoting a result, reproducing an analysis, or inferring a broader implication.
Every claim should retain the conditions under which the evidence was produced.