In the days before word processors, researchers frequently used index cards to catalogue and sort through their ideas and citations. These cards were called 'recipe cards' and were sold in packs of 100s at newsagents. They were easily transportable, and very handy when it came to putting together information from various sources, as you do in a literature review.
With an idea, citation or concept on each card, they could be moved around in relation to one another, grouping concepts and ideas and helping to organise the structure of a chapter or section, similar to the way some people use sticky notes today.
I still have the index cards from my masters dissertation, packed in a neat little index box and satisfyingly categorised by theme. They are a nostalgic reminder of the hard work of writing out and classifying citations and data longhand, and then shuffling the cards around on the floor of my res room to get everything into an order and structure that made sense and supported my argument. Although I had an early-generation word processor for writing up, it did not have all the fancy functionality that we have at our disposal today.
Whether you decide to do it electronically in an application such as Scrivener, by moving text around in a Word document, or to use physical sticky notes (or even recipe cards!), recipe carding is an essential part of drafting. The first draft of any section or chapter should never be the final draft. Your first draft will typically be a collection of ideas, and you need to structure those ideas for logical flow, link them together, and wherever possible, analyse and synthesise to bring in your own voice and to avoid redundancy and repetition.
Literature reviews in particular require a lot of organisation and structuring. A single author or source may crop up in several places in a literature review, and of course you want to group concepts under subheadings so that similar ideas are presented together to give coherence to your discussion and analysis.
That, of course, is not the same order in which we are reading the sources or taking notes for a literature review. Identifying themes, tagging and clustering are all facilitated by jumbling ideas from multiple sources together and then sorting out what they have in common and where they differ. This is why I like to think of a first draft as the recipe card stage. Once you have the ideas on paper (physical or virtual), you can shuffle them around and link them together to produce a coherent piece of writing that keeps your reader interested.
The holy grail of synthesis
Avoiding laundry listing is one of the biggest benefits of recipe carding.
The first draft of each section of your literature review will typically be just a collection of citations grouped by theme. This is the second stage of recipe carding, when you have written and tagged your cards and have now laid them out on the floor and grouped like themes together. You could think of this as the "according to" stage, in which you could list each idea by author and attribute a citation to the idea. This is NOT the draft that you want to submit to your supervisor (and not the draft that your supervisor wants to see).
The next step is the process of synthesising all of those ideas into a narrative that links one idea to the next and to the golden thread of your dissertation or thesis, while avoiding having to repeat any assertions that multiple authors have made: citing multiple authors for a single assertion and noting where other authors deviate from them does look impressive! At that point you are ready to start editing, proofreading and checking your draft for logical flow, after which it will be starting to look ready to submit to your supervisor for review.
Yes, it sounds like a lot of work, and it can feel discouraging when you have already put in all the effort of reading and getting your thoughts down on paper, but drafting correctly the first time can save you (and your supervisor and examiner) a lot of frustration and future work.