Literature review

My life since December day and night, has revolved around my literature review for my project...

• Rough draft – Bullet points to get idea across of major content in my review
• Extensive reading of over a 100 different journal articles, not including books, websites, personal communications/lectures and so forth. All papers summarised, entered into my endnote library and filed in a logical order for easy go-to referencing of citations whilst writing my review
• 1st draft – Proper sentences, flowing text, re-ordering of sections/ layout
• 2nd draft - Problems with Endnote (Citation software) and the ordering of the citations function has a mind of its own! Also review is over the 6,500 word limit set by the uni guidelines (yet I have so much more that I want to write about!)
• 3rd draft - Fixed Endnote problem (Yea!), format changes (font size/ style have to match uni and journal guidelines), finally found a way to decrease the word count and still get my information across (discovered that text in figure legends does not count, phew!)
• Final draft – Content fine, word count fine, formatting fine... everything is completed, mashAllah.
  

Approved and checked by all for content, spelling and grammar, checked again by me, printed (in colour eventually), bound together, produced an electronic copy to accompany my two hard copies and finally submitted the whole thing!

The result – A 50 page document (or there abouts) that is my literature review and serves as an introductory chapter for my research project. It discusses the importance of cerebral emboli, the theory and application of the proposed detection methods to be used, the aetiology, epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnostic criteria and past history of Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, the possible treatments to be evaluated and finally ending with brief outline of my study and the time scale that I intend to use.

Here’s hoping a get a good mark (inshaAllah) for all that effort, hard work and long nights. I don’t think I slept properly for the whole month that I had off uni... staying up till 4am, sometimes even 5am is so not good for you and yet that is the time that my house is the quietest! During the day... well lets’ just say that the ear plugs that I bought at the beginning of my uni life, were a very wise purchase indeed :P Thank god I didn’t apply for a part time job these hols, I didn’t even have time to sleep, let alone having another job!