Organizing for Themes

 Once you have collected and evaluated the relevant studies on your topic, you need to think how best to present the information in a way that captures the common themes you have found. What multiple discrete themes emerged from your review? You will need to determine these categories and concepts or themes you think are important to understanding your topic and defining your research problem. Consider what ideas surfaced across your studies and how the content from these studies can fit within some higher-level themes based on the focus of your own research. Even after you have grouped ideas and determined themes, you will need to decide how to order them in a way that makes your argument for your research problem compelling. These themes will eventually be the structure of your literature review.