Introduction
In this paper, we shall discuss how one can carry out a literature review using some examples. In brief, a literature review is a detailed examination, analysis, and integration of scholarly works including books, articles, and other reports on a particular research subject. Unlike an annotated bibliography, which involves listing sources in a summary manner, a literature review brings together ideas from previous studies and presents a well-informed discussion of the present status of the discipline, key themes and methodology. The main objective of a literature review is to provide background information on a research issue and to bring out areas that need more study.
Why are Literature Reviews
Important?
A
literature review is an integral component of conducting research as it helps
to build a strong basis for any research work. Instead of a mere compilation of
literature, it requires the synthesis of knowledge, comparison, and critical
evaluation of existing knowledge. Here are some of the most important reasons
for conducting a literature review.
To
identify gaps in current knowledge
A critical
review uncovers issues which have not been addressed, errors in methodology, or
areas which require further research. Identifying such gaps will enable you to
formulate the objective of your own research.
To
refine research questions and methodologies
Existing literature will help you to zero in on
a general topic to make it more specific. Existing literature can also provide
you with insights as to which methodologies have worked, which variables need
to be tested, and how others build their arguments.
To
develop a theoretical and conceptual framework
A review
assists you to construct the theoretical framework for your project, an
important step towards undertaking deductive research, generating hypotheses,
and building a model that links various variables.
To
support and build your arguments
Previous
research provides a structure on which you can organize your thoughts. You will
be able to use the results of previous studies as evidence to substantiate your
claims and address any objections.
To
enhance the testability and replicability of your findings
In doing
so, through reading other people’s ways of measuring concepts, one can clearly
recognize the variables that need to be considered and study them via proven
methodologies that enable the replication of your results in future research.
To
rationalize the significance of your problem
Review of
literature helps in establishing the importance of the particular research
question. Through this process, you can provide evidence for the importance of
the question and convince others that it requires further exploration.
To
develop critical cognitive and professional skills
In
fact, the act of conducting and writing a literature review is one that helps
to develop valuable skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving,
making you a better and more knowledgeable professional in your field in the
future.
Step-by-step
guide to conducting a literature review
Step A:
Define Your Goal and Formulate a Question
Identifying
your goal is the important first step, wherein you clearly lay down the
objective that you wish to accomplish through your literature review, thus
linking your literature review to a particular perspective. For that, you have
to identify the reason for your research. Hence,
Example:
In case you select a general topic like "climate change," then
defining your goal will mean setting stringent limits on your literature
review. Rather than considering all aspects of climate change, your goal can be
identified as analyzing the developments over the last ten years, specifically
with regards to how climate change affects agriculture. Likewise, if your topic
is "human behavior," then you can set the limit to analyze strictly
about how human beings behave under pressure due to rewards and peer groups.
Step B: Search the Literature
Search the
Literature is when you start searching systematically for credible information
that will help you answer the research question you have come up with in Step
A. Since there is an abundance of information available, this process requires
a strategy and certain search methods. Choosing the Right Databases and Sources
Instead of using regular Google searches, you should choose academic databases,
university library catalogue, and peer-reviewed journals to find credible
information. In case your topic requires it, you should also look for
"grey literature" such as government reports, charity reports,
conference proceedings etc.
Example:
If your research question is "How does climate change affect
agriculture?", then a regular internet search would give you way too much
in terms of opinions and news reports. Instead, you should use your university
library portal to gain access to relevant databases of environment or
agriculture, and also search for grey literature such as official agricultural
statistics provided by the government, or reports from environmental charities.
You can
use the following databases and sources to collect information for your
literature review.
|
Database / Source |
Types of Information / Content
Available |
|
Google Scholar |
Multidisciplinary academic
papers, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions |
|
Web of Science and Scopus |
High-impact peer-reviewed journal
articles, citation metrics, and conference proceedings |
|
EThOS |
UK doctoral theses and
dissertations |
|
Book Catalogues (COPAC,
British Library, Library of Congress, etc.) |
Printed and digital books, rare
manuscripts, library collections, and bibliographic records |
|
OpenDOAR |
Global directory of academic
open-access repositories and institutional research |
|
OpenGrey |
Grey literature (reports,
conference papers, technical documents, non-published research) |
|
IEEE Xplore |
Electrical engineering, computer
science, electronics, and technology research |
|
PubMed / PMC |
Biomedical literature, life
sciences, clinical studies, and healthcare research |
|
JSTOR |
Humanities, social sciences,
history, and archival journal volumes |
|
ERIC |
Education-related research,
teaching methods, and pedagogical documents |
|
ResearchGate |
Author-shared publication drafts,
preprints, research networking, and direct Q&A |
Step C:
Select and Evaluate Related Sources
When
you start choosing your sources, you will definitely notice that there are too
many papers for you to read them all throughout your life. In order to handle
such an abundance of data, it is important to learn how to read efficiently by
analyzing each paper in "layers," rather than reading them like
novels from beginning to end. First, look at the title of the paper and make
sure it is relevant enough for you. If the title seems interesting, take a look
at the abstract of the paper – it gives a brief description of the aim of the
research, methodology used, results, and conclusions. You can dedicate your
time to reading the whole paper only when the abstract clearly relates to your
research. If you do not know where to start in terms of source selection, it
will be really helpful to choose a recently published review article and check
the bibliography of this paper.
Once
you choose a pertinent paper, it is essential that you assess its overall worth
and credibility. This includes determining whether the journal is a
peer-reviewed one, meaning it has been critically assessed by relevant experts
before being published. Checking the journal's impact factor will also give you
a measure of its influence, as well as researching whether there were any
external sources of funding from organizations that may have had an agenda in
having their results published. Moreover, choosing the papers to review would
mean considering "landmark" papers, or seminal papers that form the
basis of much research conducted in the field.
After
deciding that the paper qualifies on the criteria mentioned above and getting
down to reading the whole text, one needs to do it actively, preferably while
holding a pen in his/her hands, to make some notes. One must be in the right
mindset, adopting a "reviewer's attitude" when reading the article;
in other words, one should not take everything for granted and question the
content actively. One must be able to critically analyze the methodology of the
study, wondering whether or not the number of samples was adequate, the
methodology selected appropriate, the measurements valid and reliable, and
whether or not the conclusions coincide with the obtained results. While
actively analyzing these various sources, one needs to "join the
dots" to identify some major themes and disagreements among researchers
and also the research topics which have been totally neglected.
Step
D: Analyze and Synthesize Your Findings
Analysis
and synthesis of your findings implies moving away metaphorically from mere
summary of papers to a more holistic view of your research topic. Instead of
just listing the views of one author after another, you have to be like a
weaver who takes individual strands of thread, symbolizing your sources, and
makes an entirely new piece of fabric out of them. While reading, you have to
make active attempts to find connections between your sources by asking
yourselves where researchers fully agree with each other, where they oppose
each other violently, or where are the gaping holes in the current knowledge
base. The restructuring of the gathered information according to common trends,
topics or methodologies shows that you have a profound insight into the
relationship of all these separate pieces of research to your overall topic.
Take
for instance the case where your research question is to determine whether
there has been any reduction in the grammar and punctuation proficiency of
university postgraduate students in the past few years. While summarizing, you
would just state that one study has revealed that there is a reduction in
grammar based on teacher surveys, another has found reduction by analyzing
application forms, and the third study does not find any reduction when
analyzing student thesis papers. To synthesize the information, you would make
the connection that whereas there is reduction in grammar based on subjective
teacher surveys and applications, objective analysis of actual theses reveal no
reduction in grammar. Through the analysis of the connections, you will synthesize
the literature and come to a clear conclusion that there is no actual reduction
in grammar but it is merely an issue of human perception.
Step
E: Write the Literature Review
The
process of writing your literature review is the point where you get to finally
organize your research and analyses into an organized form with a definite
beginning, middle, and end. The introductory part of your literature review is
intended to draw the reader into your topic as well as provide the necessary
context regarding your research. The important thing that you need to do here
is to define the scope of your review and let the reader know precisely which
aspects of the topic you will be discussing and which you will not.
In
the body section, you present the links that you identified through your
analysis. Unlike merely listing abstracts from one source to another, you will
have to group your literature review according to shared topics or trends in
the papers. In order to achieve this, it is important to use
"signpost" words such as "similarly" and "in
contrast" to clearly inform the reader about the point at which various
writers agree and where they vehemently disagree. It is also essential in this
section to use a formal style of writing. This means that your sentences should
be relatively short, with one major point per sentence and ideas in paragraphs.
The
conclusion is where you will make the effort to bring all your literature
review together instead of just summarizing everything that you have been
saying up till now. In the conclusion, you will give a summary of the most
important findings of your literature on the topic. It is here that you need to
identify the missing links or controversies in the topic area. If your
literature review is part of a research project, then your conclusion will
bridge that gap in a clear way.
Consider
the case where you are writing a literature review on what motivates human
beings' behavior in the face of crisis situations. When introducing your work,
you will orient the reader by telling them that although human beings' behavior
is complicated, you will limit your literature review to the influence of peer
pressure and moral values only and that you will not discuss any other aspect
of psychology. In the body part, you will connect the studies in the following
way; One researcher found that peer pressure causes panic buying to a great
extent, followed by the word "similarly," which you will use to
introduce another study with similar results carried out in a different
country. You will then take the reader through an analysis of these findings through
the use of the word "in contrast," which introduces another study
with totally opposite results. This study states that at times individuals'
moral values may overrule peer pressure. In conclusion, you will briefly
outline these contradictory findings and mention a gap such as lack of studies
regarding influence of digital social media reward systems on individual
behavior in emergencies.
Step
F: Reference and Proofread
Referencing
and proofreading will be the last steps in writing your literature review.
Referencing is a vital part of the whole process of writing an academic paper,
which demonstrates your integrity as a scholar. Academic dishonesty is taken
very seriously in the academic field because it is considered to be stealing
someone else's property. Each time you use some words, ideas, methods, or
results that you have not developed on your own, even when you rewrite them
into your own words, you have to acknowledge the author of the material used.
There is always some specific referencing format that is required at your
university or for submission to the journal, such as the Harvard (Name and
Date) or the Vancouver (Number) format. Every source you use will be referenced
in-text and in a list of references or bibliography. It is always better to add
a citation than leave it out when you are unsure if there is a need for one.
In
addition to referencing, it is equally important to proofread for grammatical
and punctuational errors, as examiners often state that the poorest mechanics
of the English language are found in papers which they mark. An amazing
analysis will surely fail because the examiner may no longer trust the analysis
due to poorly written work. In order to write professionally, always ensure
that you write relatively short sentences, as each sentence should contain only
one idea, and group similar ideas in separate paragraphs. Also, it is important
to maintain an objective tone while reviewing; hence, do not use exclamation
marks.
As
an example, let's consider the case where you are writing a literature review
on the impact of social media use on sleep patterns of teenagers. In this case,
you will find a piece of information that says that looking at screens before
sleep decreases the duration of sleep. However, in order to do a proper
referencing of this piece of information, you cannot simply present it as a
fact since you need to provide some additional details. For instance, you can
use a formula such as "smartphone use before sleep decreases significantly
the duration of sleep" (Smith and Jones, 2023). As for the proofreading of
this section, you will make sure that you did not use any overly long sentences
and removed such informal phrases as "Smartphones absolutely ruin sleep quality!"
Conclusion
In
conclusion, the literature review is an essential academic activity which does
much more than summarizing texts; rather, it is the process of evaluating and
synthesizing existing scholarly sources in order to create the basis for your
own research, find out the areas where knowledge needs further development and
not to "reinvent the wheel". To perform this activity effectively,
you should follow a particular set of steps one after another, starting from
stating the purpose of your research and formulating a prima facie question.
Next, you conduct an adequate search in academic sources employing specific
keywords and carefully evaluate the sources found by means of active layered
reading. The crucial part of this process is the analysis and synthesis of the
material obtained, where you act like a weaver who combines single colored
threads into the unique cloth. In the end, you need to write your review in an
official and objective manner that contains the introduction, the main part
(synthesis) with the use of signposts and the conclusion.
References
Cantero, C.
(2019). How to write a literature review. San José State University
Writing Center.
Douglas
College Learning Centre. (n.d.). Writing literature reviews: A guide for
students. Douglas College.
Gaw, A.
(n.d.). Writing an effective literature review: A study guide. Institute
for Academic Development, The University of Edinburgh.
Nottingham
Trent University Library. (n.d.). Getting started with your literature
review. Nottingham Trent University.
Sajeevanie,
T. L. (2021). Literature review and academic research. International Journal
of Creative Research Thoughts, 9(1), 2713–2720.
Thomas, G.
(n.d.). How to do your literature review. SAGE Publications.
UAGC
Writing Center. (2016). Guidelines for writing a literature review.
University of Arizona Global Campus Learning Services.
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