There comes a time in the life of every student that is inescapable, the time you have to write a thesis. Unless you are hiding under an table where no one can find you, this is something you will have to do. For me, this moment was early on in the study, we began practicing in the first Batchelor year. Now, four years later, I’m writing my master thesis. I’m very excited about the research I’m doing, but have to face one final obstacle. This is finding literature. For all my fellow students who dread this part of the thesis, I have some tips that helped me. Maybe, it will not be as bad after all.

I already have an article and it is beautiful

Sometimes when you write a thesis, your mentor has already given you an starting article to begin with. This can be research done on a similar topic or an global overview of the field.

An similar research question

If an article of a similar topic is given to you, it might be time to be lazy. A lot of useful literature will be used in this article. You can find this literature in the introduction of the article. While reading how these researchers sustained their hypothesis, you can check if there is literature you can use as well. More often than not, this will be the case. If you are enthusiastic and just can’t stop yourself, you can also read their whole literature-list and see if there is something for you as well. Of course, the best way to see if an article in this list is useful, is to read the abstract.

Global overview of the field

If you already have a global overview of the field, this is very useful. In such an overview, a lot of literature is used. What helps me is to read such an overview carefully, and write down the citations you find useful. These citations lead to literature used in the overview, which you can find in the literature-list. This way, you can find out what articles lead to the information you found useful. Instead of citing only the global overview  you can cite a bunch of articles and have a nice long literature-list. If one of those articles seems to have a similar research question as you, you can use the method described above.

I don’t have any articles, help me

Winter is coming. This, in combination with a pandemic, means working at home. It isn’t the best thing ever, but with this blog, I hope I can help you feel a little bit better.

A few weeks ago I had a lecture about treating depression. We talked about behavioural activation and why this is so important. I won’t bore you with the whole story (if you like clinical psychology as much as I do, you can read my summaries), but I believe some aspects of this therapy can help also you feel less blue in these dark days.

What is behavioural activation? Well, as you would probably have guessed, this means just being active. It is so simple, yet so difficult. A thing you can notice about yourself (and I have noticed about myself in yet another wave of corona), is that if you begin to feel blue, you don’t want to do anything. And, if you stop doing anything, you keep feeling blue. Most of the time, you will just have a bad day. It isn’t fun, but we have all been there (except if your extraordinarily happy, good for you). If you take a closer look at such a day, you can notice an very important thing. Namely, does lying in bed, feeling blue, really makes it better? In my experience, it doesn’t. If you keep doing nothing, there is nothing that makes live rewarding, and in that sense, fun. A second problem is that if you don’t do anything fun, you won’t ‘feel like doing anything’ again. It is a downwards circle.

To break this circle, the solution is to become active. This is all too simple, and all too difficult. Think of lying in bed and don’t feeling about doing anything, why would you come get up? The thing is, most people wait till they ‘feel like’ doing something. The problem here is, you can wait a long, long time until you feel like it. If you begin doing an activity, you slowly begin to enjoy it and ‘feel like it’. The circle is the other way around. Of course, there are days you hate everything you do and just want to pretend you are a blanket-taco in bed. But if you want to end such a day, you will have to get up.

If you think ‘you fool, I will never enjoy getting up at all’, there is a simple trick you can do. Think of what activity you want to do, but don’t feel like. Write down on a scale of 0 (the most horrible thing ever) to 10 (it will be amazing) the amount of pleasure you think the activity will give you. After you do the activity, write down the amount of pleasure the activity actually gave you. Most of the time, it will be a bit more than expected. And, if you see this, it might motivate you to do more. In