First draft of a thematic literature review - how to get started and develop initial themes
One of the things that catches a lot of qualitative PhD researchers off guard is how much a literature review stutters and splutters in the beginning. It’s like trying to start an old car on a cold morning.
You sit down fully intending to “get on with the literature review” and within half an hour you’ve opened fourteen tabs, downloaded six PDFs you probably won’t read today, and ended up less certain about your topic than you were before you started reading.
I see this a lot with doctoral researchers.
There’s often a point fairly early on where students start working very hard but lose the feeling that they can clearly see what the work is building towards. Reading expands quickly. New concepts appear before earlier ones feel fully understood. One paper points you towards another, then another, then suddenly you’re three hours deep into literature about something only vaguely connected to your actual project and someone’s calling you from downstairs to say that dinner is ready.
Part of the problem is that the literature review you write as a PhD researcher is a very different beast from those you may have written for your undergraduate or masters dissertations. At those levels of study, you’re more focused on demonstrating familiarity with a topic area, showing you understand the major arguments, positioning your assignment within existing research.
A PhD literature review is usually asking something more from you.
You’re beginning to work out how a field thinks about a problem.
This includes identifying the concepts that dominate certain discussions, the assumptions underneath particular arguments, the tensions keep popping up, and the balance between the things that are indisputable and the things that float around.
That takes time.
Why thematic literature reviews help
A lot of researchers initially approach the literature review as though the main challenge is volume. They assume they need to become more disciplined, more organised, more efficient at reading. More, more, more of everything.
A way of doing it differently is to focus instead on putting in place an outline structure.
Once you begin organising your reading around headings or themes - which can be concepts, debates, or recurring issues within the field - the literature starts becoming easier to break into.
If anyone’s ever shown you the trick to open a jar using the tip of a teaspoon rather than trying He-Man style to twist it off - that’s what we’re doing here. This is a quicker way in that results in a lot less mess.
Your themes are going to take a while to develop though, so don’t try to rush through this. Be okay with things being a bit messy to begin with. The more you read, compare, take notes and revise your own arguments, the clearer the thematic landscape will become. You’ll likely go through several iterations of your themes before you arrive at a set that feel okay. The focus here is on “okay”, not “perfect”, yes?
Starting with literature review questions
So, how do you get to your themes?
One thing I’ve found useful is encouraging students to stop thinking immediately about “the literature review chapter” and instead think about the kinds of questions they need the literature itself to help them think through.
For example, imagine a study exploring mid-career social workers’ experiences of professional development whilst balancing workplace pressures and career progression.
Early literature review questions might look something like:
How has professional development within social work been discussed in previous research?
What kinds of workplace pressures appear repeatedly in this literature?
How do researchers talk about progression, mentoring, identity, or organisational support?
Where do disagreements or tensions seem to sit?
Questions like these start giving the reading process a bit more shape. When you approach the literature with a set of questions, you are starting with intention. You have some ideas - albeit quite loose ideas - about what you want from it.
This also enables you to go in with a bit more confidence than if you dive in expecting the literature to tell you what you need. It won’t, it’s not helpful like that 😉.
Themes usually develop through reading, not before it
Your questions will help you open up the door to the literature. They’re like having a helpful estate agent show you around the rooms in a house.
However, when it comes to figuring out what to do with them - that’s for you to figure out.
So, in the same way that you’ll decide whether you want the dark blue kitchen cupboards that all the influencers have or whether you want to go for something more neutral, you need to decide what kind of literature review you are actually building and which conversations genuinely belong inside it.
At first, students often assume themes are simply “there” waiting to be discovered in the literature like buried treasure. In reality, themes are shaped partly by what you are interested in noticing.
Two people can read exactly the same body of literature and come away with very different thematic structures because they are asking different questions of it.
One researcher looking at professional development in social work may become increasingly interested in emotional labour and burnout. Another may find themselves drawn towards organisational culture and institutional support structures. Someone else may become preoccupied with identity, belonging, or progression pathways.
This is one of the reasons thematic literature reviews take time to settle. You are not simply collecting information. You are slowly developing a perspective on the field itself - and it may take a while to figure that out.
Learning to be okay with mess
There’s also usually a point where people get annoyed because the literature refuses to organise itself neatly. Sorry to break this to you but the academic literature is a state.
Academic fields are messy because people are messy. Researchers disagree with each other, work from different assumptions, use different terminology for similar ideas, and sometimes spend twenty pages arguing about concepts that appear almost identical to an outsider - you know, the kind of thing that if you brought it up in everyday conversation, your partner would give you “that” look.
Part of doctoral-level reading is learning how to sit inside that uncertainty without trying to tidy it up too quickly.
This is also why I’m not a huge fan of students trying to write polished literature review prose too early.
At the beginning, it’s often more useful to work in rough outlines, bullet points, messy notes, half-finished thematic groupings, badly drawn diagrams, colour coding systems that only make sense to you, and documents full of phrases like “possibly related to identity stuff??”.
Students sometimes worry that because the work looks messy, the thinking itself must also be poor quality. Usually the opposite is true. Some of the most intellectually productive stages of the PhD look completely chaotic from the outside.
Eventually, though, the patterns do start becoming easier to recognise.
You begin noticing that certain authors are repeatedly cited together. Groups of concepts travel together. Specific arguments keep resurfacing in slightly different forms across different parts of the literature. Some debates feel very active and unresolved, whilst others feel much more settled.
That’s often the point where the literature review starts becoming easier to structure because the field itself begins feeling more familiar to you. That’s what we’re aiming for at this stage - getting you into the literature.
When you’re ready for more structured help
When you’re ready to start putting your literature review together, figuring out how theory fits into all this and how you should actually go about building it, my Literature Review PhD Survival Guide is built specifically for this.
“I’ve read so much, but I still don’t know what I’m trying to say”
You've read countless papers, but your literature review still feels like disconnected summaries rather than a clear argument. You now need a structure for making sense of what you've read - this guide gives you that structure.
Swipe through the images to explore the frameworks, worksheets, and guidance included.
Get the full Survival Guide set here.
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