Best Book to Understand Literature Review for Dummies
The Literature Review | A Consummate Stride-by-Step Guide
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of electric current knowledge, allowing you to place relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analysing publications (such as books and journal articles) that chronicle to your enquiry question. There are five chief steps in the process of writing a literature review:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A good literature review doesn't just summarise sources – information technology analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.
Why write a literature review?
When you write a dissertation or thesis, y'all will have to conduct a literature review to situate your inquiry within existing cognition. The literature review gives y'all a risk to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a argue
You lot might also take to write a literature review as a stand-lone consignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content volition await slightly different in each example, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Step i: Search for relevant literature
Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review department of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research objectives and questions.
If y'all are writing a literature review every bit a stand up-alone assignment, you volition have to choose a focus and develop a fundamental question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to exist answerable without collecting original information. You should exist able to respond it based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Get-go past creating a list of keywords related to your inquiry topic. Include each of the fundamental concepts or variables you lot're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You tin add to this listing if you lot notice new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental wellness
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some databases to search for journals and manufactures include:
- Your university's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Projection Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
You lot can utilise boolean operators to help narrow downward your search:
- AND to observe sources that contain more than one keyword (e.one thousand. social media AND torso image AND generation Z
- OR to find sources that contain one of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- Non to exclude results containing sure terms (due east.g. apple Non fruit)
Read the abstract to notice out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, y'all can cheque the bibliography to discover other relevant sources.
To identify the most of import publications on your topic, take annotation of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, brand sure to seek them out.
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Step 2: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't exist able to read admittedly everything that has been written on the topic – you'll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.
For each publication, enquire yourself:
- What question or problem is the author addressing?
- What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the research utilize established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication chronicle to other literature in the field? Does information technology confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your agreement of the topic? What are its central insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the inquiry?
Brand sure the sources yous employ are apparent, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of inquiry.
You tin find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count ways the commodity has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.
The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually simply review contempo literature, just in the humanities you lot might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has inverse in pregnant over fourth dimension).
Take notes and cite your sources
Equally you lot read, y'all should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you tin can later on incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It'southward of import to keep runway of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.
You can use our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.
Step 3: Place themes, debates and gaps
To begin organising your literature review's statement and structure, y'all need to empathise the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where practice sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the management of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This step will help you lot work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) prove how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Most research has focused on young women.
- In that location is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Merely there is nevertheless a lack of robust research on highly-visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your ain inquiry.
Pace 4: Outline your literature review'south structure
There are diverse approaches to organising the trunk of a literature review. You should have a rough thought of your strategy before you start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might exist thematic, merely each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if y'all choose this strategy, be conscientious to avoid just list and summarising sources in lodge.
Try to analyse patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why sure developments occurred.
Thematic
If y'all have found some recurring central themes, you can organise your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if y'all are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economical admission.
Methodological
If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods, you lot might desire to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:
- Expect at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative inquiry
- Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You tin use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of central concepts.
You might contend for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Stride v: Write your literature review
Like whatsoever other academic text, your literature review should accept an introduction, a main trunk, and a conclusion. What yous include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Dissertation literature review
If you are writing the literature review as role of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your primal trouble or enquiry question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic ("many recent studies have focused on the trouble of x") or highlight a gap in the literature ("while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration").
Stand up-alone literature review
If you are writing a stand-lone paper, give some background on the topic and its importance, discuss the telescopic of the literature you volition review (for example, the fourth dimension menstruation of your sources), and state your objective. What new insight will yous draw from the literature?
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You tin can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.
As you write, make sure to follow these tips:
- Summarise and synthesise: requite an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
- Analyse and translate: don't just paraphrase other researchers – add your ain interpretations, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole.
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources.
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: employ transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.
Determination
In the decision, y'all should summarise the central findings you lot accept taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.
Dissertation literature review
If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or hash out how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your inquiry. This can lead directly into your methodology section.
Stand-alone literature review
If you are writing a stand-solitary paper, you tin discuss the overall implications of the literature or brand suggestions for future research based on the gaps you have identified.
Frequently asked questions about literature reviews
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to acquit a literature review at the outset of a research project:
- To familiarise yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that yous're not just repeating what others accept already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing enquiry and what new insights information technology will contribute.
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