1 There Is Need for the Researcher to Define New Concepts in the Literature Review
The Literature Review | A Complete Step-past-Step Guide
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, assuasive yous to place relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing enquiry.
Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analysing publications (such as books and journal articles) that relate to your enquiry question. There are 5 principal 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 but summarise sources – information technology analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a articulate picture of the land of knowledge on the subject.
Why write a literature review?
When you write a dissertation or thesis, you lot will have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a gamble to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your inquiry
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Testify how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a fence
Y'all might also have to write a literature review equally a stand-alone consignment. In this example, the purpose is to evaluate the electric current state of inquiry and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content volition look slightly unlike in each example, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the aforementioned steps.
Step 1: Search for relevant literature
Earlier y'all begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review department of a dissertation or inquiry paper, you lot will search for literature related to your inquiry objectives and questions.
If you are writing a literature review equally a stand-solitary consignment, you volition take to choose a focus and develop a key question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer information technology based simply on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Commencement by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. Include each of the central concepts or variables yous're interested in, and listing whatever synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you observe new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Trunk epitome, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to brainstorm searching for sources. Some databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your university'south library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economic science)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
Y'all tin can utilize boolean operators to aid narrow downwardly your search:
- AND to notice sources that contain more 1 keyword (e.g. social media AND body image AND generation Z
- OR to find sources that contain one of a range of synonyms (due east.thou. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT to exclude results containing certain terms (due east.g. apple NOT fruit)
Read the abstruse to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can cheque the bibliography to notice other relevant sources.
To identify the nigh of import publications on your topic, accept note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
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Stride ii: 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 about relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or problem is the author addressing?
- What are the primal concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the cardinal theories, models and methods? Does the inquiry use established frameworks or accept an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make sure the sources yous apply are credible, and make certain you lot read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of enquiry.
You can find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article 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 but review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for case, to trace how a concept has changed in significant over fourth dimension).
Take notes and cite your sources
As you read, yous should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can afterwards contain into the text of your literature review.
Information technology's important to keep track of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism. It can be helpful to brand an annotated bibliography, where you lot compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps y'all remember what you read and saves time subsequently in the process.
You tin can employ our gratuitous APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.
Stride 3: Identify themes, debates and gaps
To begin organising your literature review'south argument and structure, yous need to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you lot can wait for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches get more or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there whatever influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This pace will help y'all work out the construction of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own inquiry volition contribute to existing noesis.
- Most research has focused on young women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Merely there is still a lack of robust research on highly-visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that yous could accost in your ain research.
Step 4: Outline your literature review's structure
There are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. You lot should take a crude idea of your strategy before yous start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you tin can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall construction might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. Even so, if y'all choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply list and summarising sources in order.
Try to analyse patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you have establish some recurring fundamental themes, you can organise your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, primal themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a multifariousness of research methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that sally from unlike approaches. For example:
- Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Hash out how the topic has been approached past empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is frequently the foundation for a theoretical framework. You can utilize it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
Y'all might fence for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step 5: Write your literature review
Like any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. What you 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 equally part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or enquiry question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic ("many recent studies accept focused on the trouble of x") or highlight a gap in the literature ("while at that place has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration").
Stand up-alone literature review
If you are writing a stand-alone paper, give some groundwork on the topic and its importance, discuss the scope of the literature y'all will review (for example, the time catamenia of your sources), and state your objective. What new insight volition you draw from the literature?
Trunk
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. Y'all 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 interpret: don't but paraphrase other researchers – add your own 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: use transitions and topic sentences to describe connections, comparisons and contrasts.
Conclusion
In the conclusion, you lot should summarise the key findings you have 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 discuss how you take fatigued on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your inquiry. This can atomic number 82 directly into your methodology section.
Stand-alone literature review
If you are writing a stand up-alone newspaper, you can 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?
-
In that location are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the commencement of a research projection:
- To familiarise yourself with the electric current state of cognition on your topic
- To ensure that you're not just repeating what others have already done
- To identify gaps in cognition and unresolved issues that your inquiry tin address
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the primal findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it volition contribute.
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