'Reverse Engineering' the Pitching Research Template: A Simple Tool to Help Understand the Academic Literature

Academic literature can be wordy and hard to understand. This letter discusses the application of the "pitching research" template by Faff (2015, 2016) as a useful tool to help PhD students in understanding the literature – and particularly the “key” papers – that they read for their research. The authors also offer personal reflections on the experience of using the pitch template for this purpose and encourage other PhD students to use it to aid their research.