Is 12 hours enough time to find ten sources for a lit review?

Yes, you can realistically find, filter, and organize ten peer-reviewed sources in twelve hours, but it is going to require a highly disciplined, strategic approach rather than a deep, leisurely read of each paper. The main reason this is doable is that you do not actually need to read all ten studies from cover to cover tonight to write a solid literature review. Instead, your goal is to master the art of strategic scanning, focusing on abstracts, introductions, and conclusions to determine a source's relevance and key findings. Since you have never used your university library databases before, the learning curve will take up your first hour, but once you understand how to use search filters, the actual retrieval process will speed up significantly. The biggest trap you will run into tonight is the rabbit hole of perfectionism. A common misconception is that you must find the absolute perfect sources that perfectly align with your thesis before you can start writing. In reality, you just need ten credible, peer-reviewed sources that speak to your general topic and to each other. For example, if you are writing about the impact of screen time on adolescent sleep patterns, you do not need ten papers that all say the exact same thing. You just need a few that show a strong correlation, a couple that explore the psychological mechanisms, and maybe one or two that offer a dissenting or nuanced view. Once you log into your library database, immediately check the boxes for peer-reviewed and full-text online. This ensures you do not waste precious time requesting articles through interlibrary loan or finding out an article is behind a paywall. Your success tonight depends heavily on how you manage your time and your cognitive energy over this twelve-hour stretch. Spend the first two hours doing nothing but searching, downloading PDFs, and generating the citations. Do not write a single sentence of your paper until you have all ten sources saved in a folder. As you find each source, immediately copy its citation into your bibliography and write a two-sentence summary of its main finding in your own words. This creates a makeshift annotated bibliography that will serve as the roadmap for your actual paper. If you try to find a source, read it, write a paragraph, and then go search for the next one, you will run out of time and end up with a disjointed paper. Ultimately, the trade-off of this crunch session is that your depth of understanding will be shallower than if you had spent weeks on research, but your bibliography will remain completely intact and academically rigorous. Just keep your search terms specific, use boolean operators like AND to narrow down your results, and rely heavily on the bibliographies of the first two good papers you find to lead you to the other eight. You have enough time to pull this off, so take a deep breath, open up your library portal, and focus on gathering your raw materials first.