Dozens of hours selecting and organizing literature like a robot. Going back and forth to check decisions I made to include or exclude papers, because I need to confess: I am a human being with mood swings and doubts – not a robot.

Being confronted with essential, but difficult questions concerning the content, goal and scope of my research. How to define the kind of food aid initiatives I focus on? How does the national and cultural context shape my research? Which other national contexts could be relevant, why those and others not?

Cursing the choice I made to take dignity as the main concept in my PhD research. A concept that is studied in many fields without one clear definition, that doesn´t have a general meaning applicable to various situations, and which reveals contradictions in itself (as an objective and subjective phenomenon, public and private or inalienable and something that can be destroyed).

These are just a few of the challenges I faced while conducting my scoping review. As part of my PhD project about the dignity of recipients in divers food aid contexts in Europe, I investigated what is known in scientific literature about ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated and protected in diverse contexts of third sector food aid in high-income countries.

Don’t worry! This blogpost will not be an elegy about my journey of conducting a literature review. On the contrary, conducting a scoping review as part of my PhD research was a very rewarding experience for me, sparking new energy for my research. Join me as I share how the challenges described above actually gave me joy and rewarded me.