On every subject so much has been written that you always feel that you are leaving something out, that you are still missing something.

In order to create a high quality work you feel like you always need to dig deeper (read it all) but at some point it becomes impossibile.

So how do you decide when to stop, how you find the "this is it" moment, when you are not going to add other books, papers, articles any more?

I'm struggling quite a bit with this right now (and I've just written the first chapter of my dissertation).

@kappazeta my personal experience has been exactly the same. There is no apparent ending to the things you can read and add to a piece of writing. And you struggle to collect and frantically read as much as you can, delaying the time you actually start writing.

I don’t have an healthy answer to this. The thing that stopped me have always been the deadlines. At one point I would either start writing or I would have never made it. And in the process of writing I wrote the things I took notes about and completely forget about others. When re-reading, I was either satisfied or I remembered that I wanted to add something, evaluated if that was necessary/possible, and either doing it or not.

@kappazeta A more mature answer would be that there is a lot of redundancy in academic publishing (at least in my field), and when writing a dissertation, especially if you have these thoughts, you are knowledgeable enough to filter out the noise (even unknowingly). Of the hundreds of downloaded papers you might actually read half and use a dozen of them (thank god summary papers exist). If the final product isn’t good enough, you’ll likely notice or remember you wanted to add something else, and then come back to literature review. Also, especially for dissertations, early advises and informal reviews/opinions on chapter drafts by colleagues and supervisors (if they are good) helps a lot.

A strong note-taking system might also help, but I’ve never developed a proper one, so I can’t really speak.