At the instance of my friend Laith Al-Kadhimi, I presented a paper entitled ‘A beginner’s guide to literature review writing: Understanding the What, How and Where’ to postgraduate students at the University of Technology, Iraq-Baghdad via a Google Meet.

During the session, I attempted to provide answers to the following questions:

Understanding the What:

• What is a literature review?
• What type of literature review should one undertake?
• What is the rationale behind conducting a literature review?
• What is the primary focus of attention?
• What are some practical steps for conducting a literature review?

Understanding the How:

• How do I select the right keywords for my research work?
• How can I Fastrack my literature review search?
• How can I annotate, organise, store, and generate a bibliography for my literature review?
• How do I avoid writing a ‘laundry list of previous studies’ since every supervisor “has horror stories of literature reviews which were tediously and irrelevantly descriptive”?

Understanding the Where:

• Where could I explore further to improve my literature review writing capabilities?

Here is the link to my presentation https://1drv.ms/p/s!Anh3UYU9XThlyFZEMhWjFl3167-q. Kindly share it with your network; perhaps, it will benefit some of our students.