I have just finished re-doing my literature review on self-regulated learning. I am sure I will have to revisit it again, but for now I have done another good whack at it. At the time of my doctoral assessment, I was not happy with the literature review as I felt I had to really rush it to get it done in time for the doctoral assessment paper. So instead of approaching it from the thorough, systematic way I would normally do it, it was a bit (a lot) ad hoc. This was reflected in the comments from the markers where it was clear my lit review was the weakest area of the paper. But that is ok, I knew it would be, and I always planned to come back and do it properly, it has just taken me a year or so to get around to it! As much as I would like to be able to just do it half-heartedly, I can’t, I have to do it properly.

When I did it before, I spent too long in the general ‘learning’ literature. I went too far back in order to get a good grasp of the field as a whole where really it is just from the mid 80s that self-regulated learning starts being researched (at least under this term). So by the time I got to the paper, I had been bogged down in the pre-1980s ‘learning’ area literature and so had only really spent time in the first half of the research, not the latter half. I was still trying to work out who the key people were and what the key papers were. And this is not an easy task. It seems obvious to me now who the key people/papers are, but at the time one seems as important as another and it is only through extensive reading and seeing certain names pop up over and over again that you work it out. To make it harder at the time around 6 of the key texts (each with 15 or so articles in them, all relevant to what I was doing) were not in the uni library so I had to order them from Amazon then by the time they came I didn’t really have time to read them properly and incorporate that research into my paper. In fact looking back now, I am amazed they let me through to the next stage!

So this time I wanted to do it properly so I wouldn’t have to go back and do it again (or at least not to this level again). And at least I had a decent starting point this time, I knew what to look for and where to look for it.
So this is what I did.
1. Checked that all articles I’d printed were listed in my references spreadsheet.
2. Checked that all e-versions of articles were printed.
3. Took out the articles that were not specific to SRL.
4. Went through every issue from the last 10 years of the major journals in the area (did around 20 journals – see below). This was incredibly tedious as it involves finding a database that has full text versions of the articles, clicking on each issue (and some have 4-6 issues per year) and reading the title of each article in that issue. Then if I found an article I had to check I didn’t already have it, then download it, save it, print it (I hate reading off the screen for these articles) and reference it. I know I could just use the search function and key words to search the database, and that is what I did the first time round. But by doing it this way I came across quite a lot of interesting articles that I had not located before with the search parameters. So tedious, but I can feel confident that I have been thorough and that I haven’t missed anything major.
5. Then I went to the most recent books/articles of importance and spent half a day reading through their reference lists. Is there anything more tedious than reading a list of references. I think not. Same sort of process as above, if I came across something I thought would be relevant, check if I had it, if not, go online and locate it to download it. Much better though than having to go to the library and photocopy it though like in the old days.
6. So I ended up with around 250 references on SRL.
7. Next step, a couple of days in bed where I speed read/skim every article to get an overall feel for everything in its entirety. While doing this I managed to cull a few references that I thought would be relevant but weren’t, and find a few more that I needed to locate.
8. Then the fun part, time to start at the most recent through to the oldest and read each one thoroughly and see what needs to be added to my current literature review. This took X days

Journals that I have now trolled through systematically from 2000-2010:
American Educational Research Journal
Educational Psychologist
Educational Psychology Review
Contemporary Educational Psychology
Cognition and Instruction
Australian Journal of Educational & Developmental Psychology
Australian Educational Researcher
British Journal of Educational Psychology
Educational Researcher
Learning and Individual Differences
Theory into Practice
Journal of Educational Pyschologist
Educational Research Journal
Learning and Instruction
European Journal of Psychology of Education