Hi
@solidator611 Don’t give up, it’s not easy to do such a large task in a short period of time, but it’s possible to write a dissertation in this time frame.
I know several students (they did lab-based projects, rather than reviews) who wrote their theses in less time, and some were quite good! It can depend on how well you ‘set yourself up’ for this writing period (e.g. one had all her graphs completed and had read a lot of papers, so just needed to put her results into context for the discussion and write down all of her existing knowledge in the introduction).
The most important thing to remember is ‘the longer you spend worrying, the less time you spend working’. Easier said than done, but it’s advice that really helped me! Try to stay motivated, remember why you wanted to do this masters in the first place, and keep a strong support group of friends and family around if you can.
The first thing you should do is ask you supervisor to help you make a plan. Before your next meeting, if you have time, write out several approaches that you think you could take. For example, you could change your inclusion criteria for the review, and read new papers. Or you could slightly change the scope of your thesis (with your supervisors approval) to make the papers you have read ‘fit’. Think about other ways to work around your current problems, and your supervisor (who should have more experience working with the literature and thesis-writing) may have additional suggestions. They will also have a better sense on what is a realistic timeline for your project (compared to strangers on the internet!).
The plan should include a timeline of each part, how long you will spend reading, when you will have your first draft of each section of your thesis completed, if you can get feedback from your supervisor when you will send them each section/draft. Then you will have the big job of ‘writing an entire thesis’ (which seems very daunting) into smaller, more manageable objectives.
The most important thing about reading papers is making notes while you read. It makes writing about those papers so much faster, and finding which paper you need for each section so much easer, if you have those notes. What type of notes and how you take them varies with personal preference, but having a few key sentences summarising what that paper has that is relevant to your project
in your own words is vital. From there, having sections highlighted and colour-coded to draw my attention is something I like (e.g. green is for methods, red is for something I’m not sure about, yellow is background knowledge, purple is for the main message/results of the research). It helps me skim through the paper quickly while writing and still get to the most important parts. Other people prefer keywords, writing more extensive summaries, etc. Keep these notes organised (and saved), as having notes is not useful unless you can use them effectively!
Overall, ask for help from your supervisor to make a plan, don’t panic, and make effective notes while reading to make the writing faster.
Best of luck with your thesis,
Ciara
3rd year Agrifood PhD student
Cranfield Student Ambassador