What Is Considered to Be Essential to a Thorough and Relevant Review of the Literature?
What Is a Literature Review | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of current noesis, allowing you to place relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such every bit books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are five key steps:
- 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 summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to requite a clear moving-picture show of the state of knowledge on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When y'all write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, you volition have to carry a literature review to situate your inquiry inside existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance 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 research addresses a gap or contributes to a contend
Y'all might also have to write a literature review as a stand up-alone assignment. In this example, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of enquiry and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will expect slightly different in each case, simply the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly of import skill if y'all want to apply for graduate schoolhouse or pursue a career in research.
Step 1: Search for relevant literature
Before you brainstorm searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic.
If you lot are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or enquiry newspaper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions.
If you are writing a literature review every bit a stand-alone assignment, you will have to cull a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Different a dissertation research question, this question has to exist accountable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer information technology based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Start by creating a list of keywords related to your enquiry question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you're interested in, and list whatever synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body epitome, self-perception, cocky-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Employ your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful 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 informatics)
Yous can use boolean operators to assist narrow downwardly your search:
- AND: to discover sources that contain more than than ane keyword (due east.g. social media AND trunk prototype 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 certain terms (e.g. apple tree Not fruit)
Read the abstruse to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you lot observe a useful volume or article, you can check the bibliography to observe other relevant sources.
To identify the about important publications on your topic, have notation of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make certain to seek them out.
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Step 2: Evaluate and select sources
Yous probably won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you lot'll accept to evaluate which sources are nigh relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or problem is the writer 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 arroyo?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it ostend, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its fundamental insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make sure the sources you apply are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
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 subject: in the sciences you commonly only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in pregnant over time).
Have notes and cite your sources
As you read, you should likewise begin the writing process. Take notes that you tin can subsequently incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is of import to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It can exist helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and assay for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.
Step 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To brainstorm organizing your literature review'due south argument and structure, you need to empathise the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, y'all can wait 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 beyond the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there any 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 volition 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 inquiry has focused on young women.
- At that place is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- But there is nonetheless a lack of robust inquiry on highly visual platforms similar Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you lot could address in your ain research.
Step 4: Outline your literature review's structure
There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You should accept a crude idea of your strategy before you commencement writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest arroyo is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you cull this strategy, be careful to avoid just list and summarizing sources in order.
Try to clarify patterns, turning points and key debates that take shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you have establish some recurring central themes, you tin can organize your literature review into subsections that accost dissimilar aspects of the topic.
For instance, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant wellness outcomes, fundamental themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal condition, and economic admission.
Methodological
If y'all draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that utilize a variety of enquiry methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that sally from dissimilar approaches. For case:
- Wait at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative inquiry
- Hash out how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Carve up the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You tin can utilize it to talk over various theories, models, and definitions of central concepts.
You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical arroyo, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your enquiry.
Step five: Write your literature review
Like whatsoever other academic text, your literature review should take an introduction, a principal body, and a decision. 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.
Trunk
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous might want to divide the trunk into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.
As you write, you can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: requite an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Analyze and interpret: don't just paraphrase other researchers—add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature every bit a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you lot have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When y'all've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Non a language skilful? Cheque out Scribbr's professional Proofreading & Editing service!
Gratis lecture slides
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Frequently asked questions
- 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 project:
- To familiarize yourself with the electric current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you're not just repeating what others take already done
- To place gaps in noesis and unresolved issues that your research can address
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the central findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your piece of work relates to existing inquiry and what new insights it will contribute.
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