A doctoral project can take many forms. You might develop a book, design a program, plan a startup, or conduct applied research. Whatever you build, you need to understand the academic knowledge beneath it. That is the job of the literature review.
At City Vision University, we approach the doctoral project as work in two cultures. The literature review follows academic conventions. Most of the project follows the needs of your professional context and stakeholders. You need to be able to work in both cultures without confusing their purposes.
The immediate task is manageable: choose one domain related to your project and write a rapid scoping literature review. You are not trying to master every field your final project might touch. You are learning how to find authoritative sources, read them responsibly, and synthesize what they contribute.
Key Takeaways
- Focus a rapid scoping review on one researchable domain connected to your doctoral project.
- Read the relevant original material before citing any article or book.
- Use AI to discover terminology and sources, not to replace source reading or substantive writing.
- Connect academic evidence with the practical needs and audiences of your final project.
Table of Contents
- What the Literature Review Contributes
- Choose the Right Kind of Review
- Select a Domain You Can Research Well
- Build the Review on Sources You Have Read
- Write for Both Academic and Practitioner Audiences
- Learn the Concepts Before You Assemble the Project
- Build One Sound Piece of the Foundation
What the Literature Review Contributes
Think of your doctoral project as a Lego city. Earlier coursework helps you sketch the city and explore its different districts. A literature review takes you into the academic district, where you build with carefully selected materials and follow more specific rules.
Those materials are primarily peer-reviewed articles and authoritative books. They help you gain mastery of a domain rather than rely only on familiar language, personal experience, or a convenient web summary. The rules include reading what you cite and documenting sources accurately. Other parts of your doctoral project may allow more flexibility, but the academic district has stricter zoning.
The review you write now might eventually inform your final doctoral project, but it will cover only one small part of its foundation. Your complete literature review will need to address the major academic concepts on which the finished project depends. You may be able to reuse some of this work, although you should expect to update it as your understanding grows.
One project, two sets of norms
In City Vision’s model, the academic literature review is intended to represent roughly 10% to 20% of the total doctoral project effort. The practitioner-oriented project represents roughly 80% to 90%. Across the three doctoral project courses, the work is expected to total about 500 hours, so even a relatively small academic portion deserves serious attention.
The larger project should serve your context. What do you need to create? What do your stakeholders need? A book and a startup plan will look very different. There are still program and accreditation requirements, so producing a practical output alone is not the entire doctoral project. The point is to combine credible research with something useful in the world.
Choose the Right Kind of Review
“Literature review” can describe several different tasks. Choosing the right one keeps you from promising a level of coverage that your assignment cannot deliver.
- Annotated bibliography: A collection of sources with notes about each one. It can help organize reading, but it is not the same as a synthesis of a field.
- Rapid scoping review: A focused, streamlined effort to identify and synthesize evidence in a particular domain. This is the model for the current project.
- Full scoping review: A broader effort to understand the scope of existing research, particularly valuable before committing to a major new study.
- Systematic review: A more rigorous assessment of a body of research, with substantially greater demands on time and method.
A rapid scoping review is meant to be completed quickly. The broader time range presented for this type of work is zero to six months, while this course’s assignment takes a couple of weeks. By comparison, a full scoping review may take three to twelve months, and a systematic review may take nine to eighteen months. These are different undertakings, not interchangeable labels.
Suppose a research team is considering a biology study that could take five or six years. They would want a thorough understanding of whether the work had already been done. A full scoping or systematic review could be appropriate. That is not what we are asking of a student exploring one domain for a practical doctoral project.
A rapid review uses a narrower question and a streamlined process. AI can help you move efficiently, especially while discovering terminology and locating possible sources. Speed does not remove the obligation to check what the sources actually say.
Select a Domain You Can Research Well
A topic is promising when it meets three conditions: it relates to your doctoral project, it has a meaningful body of peer-reviewed research, and you can obtain the sources you need to read. A topic can be important to your work and still be a poor choice for this particular assignment if the academic literature is too sparse or inaccessible.
Consider change management. It appears in textbooks and management writing, which is a useful sign that an established body of concepts and research exists. Other possible domains include residential recovery programs, addiction aftercare and relapse prevention, and organizational change. “Organizational culture” may be too broad on its own, so you would need to determine what portion is most relevant.
The language your organization uses may not be the language researchers use. If you search only for the exact phrase “gospel rescue missions,” for example, you may find little peer-reviewed research under that name. The better move is to identify the related academic domains and search using their terminology.
A practical topic-selection process
- Start with your project. Identify one question or domain that would help explain the work you hope to do.
- Explore the vocabulary. Use AI research to learn the academic terms associated with that domain, including alternatives to your organization’s everyday language.
- Test the literature. Search for peer-reviewed articles using those terms. Look for enough relevant work to support a synthesis.
- Check access. Make sure you can obtain and read the articles, not merely see their titles or abstracts.
- Narrow the scope. Choose a domain you can address credibly within a rapid review rather than attempting to cover your entire project.
Access is not a minor logistical detail. Some articles sit behind paywalls that even a university library may not cover. Open-access journals and the library’s available subscriptions can be valuable, but you should check what you can actually read before settling on a topic.
Build the Review on Sources You Have Read
Here is the most important citation rule: read the original source, or at least the relevant portions, before you cite it. An AI summary is not a substitute. AI tools may draw from an abstract rather than the full article, and their description may not capture the argument accurately.
If you cannot access a source to read it, do not cite it as though you have. That may limit your choices, but it protects the integrity of your work. A smaller set of accessible, well-understood sources is better than an impressive-looking reference list you cannot defend.
Prioritize publications in peer-reviewed journals and authoritative documents or books in your field. Some books are foundational enough to define a domain. Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations, for example, is an important work when researching diffusion of innovation.
Secondary sources can still help you get oriented. A web page, Wikipedia entry, or AI deep research report may introduce terminology and point toward original publications. Treat it as a route to those sources, not as a replacement for them. The general guidance for this work is to keep internet-based secondary sources to a limited portion of the citations, around 10% to 20%, while grounding the review primarily in authoritative work.
Use AI to find the path, not to stand in for the reading
AI is particularly useful at the discovery stage. You can ask it to clarify a term, suggest related research areas, or provide references to investigate. Then follow those references back to the original articles and books. Verify that each source exists, is relevant, and says what you intend to attribute to it.
You can also ask for references with a digital object identifier, or DOI, when one is available. A DOI provides a persistent identifier for a publication even if its web address changes. It helps you locate and manage a source, but a DOI by itself does not establish that you have read the work.
For organizing references, a tool such as Zotero can save time. One suggested AI research workflow requests an APA seventh-edition reference list and a BibTeX version of the sources, which can be imported into a reference manager. You still need to check every entry against the original source. Follow APA Style for formatting and your program’s guidance for acknowledging AI research. Using AI to help correct citation punctuation and formatting is different from having it write the substantive review for you.
Write for Both Academic and Practitioner Audiences
The literature review and the rest of the doctoral project may speak to different audiences. Imagine a map with Christian and secular contexts in one direction, and scientific and popular-pragmatic communication in the other. The literature review belongs toward the academic, scientific side. A practical project may belong elsewhere on the map, depending on its purpose and stakeholders.
This calls for code switching: communicating in the language appropriate to each setting while keeping the underlying work coherent. If you write for a ministry audience, you may use familiar Christian language in your practical output. In the literature review, you must also be able to describe relevant ideas through academic concepts and evidence.
Neither audience automatically makes a project more valuable. A practical book or organizational initiative can be excellent work. It does not, by itself, demonstrate the research and synthesis expected at the doctoral level. Conversely, a rigorous academic review has limited practical value if it never informs the problem you are trying to solve.
Research aimed at audiences outside a faith-based organization shows why this bridge matters. Work assessing faith-based responses to homelessness, for example, needs credible methods and language that people beyond the organization can evaluate. Developing that capacity expands where your ideas can travel. You may remain most fluent in a Christian, practical setting while becoming much more capable of contributing in secular academic settings too.
Learn the Concepts Before You Assemble the Project
I often use Lego bricks to describe concepts. A term such as therapeutic alliance may seem small, but understanding it gives you a useful piece of a much larger intellectual structure. When you encounter a term you do not know, look it up. An AI tool can offer a quick initial explanation; your subsequent reading can tell you how researchers use it in your domain.
Those individual concepts become groups of related ideas, then larger domains. Courses in systems thinking, strategy, values alignment, research technology, social entrepreneurship, organizational culture, and leadership provide different sets of building materials. Coursework and smaller projects help you learn what each piece can do.
The point is not to pile all your course assignments together and declare the doctoral project finished. Different final products require different designs. A book has a different structure from a startup plan, and a hybrid project may combine several outputs. Doctoral work asks you to become the builder who can select and connect the right concepts for the problem at hand.
One especially useful connection is between sacred and professional language. You might explore how a church community relates to ideas about social capital, including bonding and bridging relationships. You might examine how a sense of divine calling relates to workforce resilience. These are bridges for inquiry, not claims that two terms mean exactly the same thing. Good research helps you discover where a connection is useful and where it needs qualification.
You can also learn from the structure of research prompts shared in coursework. Rather than accepting an AI response as an answer, study how a prompt identifies a domain, requests sources, and sets constraints. Then adapt that approach to the concepts your own project requires.
Build One Sound Piece of the Foundation
Your rapid scoping review is one small building in the academic district of a much larger doctoral city. Its scope is deliberately limited. Its value comes from doing that limited work well: selecting a researchable domain, locating authoritative and accessible sources, reading before citing, and bringing the evidence together in your own academic writing.
That process may feel slower than developing a practical idea directly. There are more rules to follow. But those rules give you something important: the ability to explain the foundation of your work to people who do not share your professional vocabulary or your faith commitments. From there, you can build a project that fits your context and has the research behind it to travel beyond that context.