3 Literature Review

Literature Review
What is a review of the literature?

A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. It is part of the introduction to an essay, research report, or thesis. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research interest, the problem or issue you want to discuss, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the materials available, or a set of summaries.
Purpose of Literature Review

1. Information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods to identify a set of useful articles and books.
2. Critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.
A literature review must do these things:

1. be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing 2. synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known 3. identify areas of controversy in the literature 4. formulate questions that need further research which will be the subject of your thesis
Ask yourself questions like these:

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What is the specific thesis, problem, or research question that my literature review helps to define? What type of literature review am I conducting? Am I looking at issues of theory? methodology? policy? quantitative research (e.g., on the effectiveness of a new procedure? qualitative research (e.g., in-depth studies)? What is the scope of my literature review? What types of publications am I using (e.g., journals, books, government documents, popular media)? What discipline am I working in (e.g., governance, development, sociology, economics)?
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How good was my information seeking? Has my search been wide enough to ensure Ive found all the relevant materials? Has it been narrow enough to exclude irrelevant materials? Is the number of sources Ive used appropriate for the length of my paper? Have I critically analyzed the literature? Do I follow through a set of concepts and questions, comparing items with each other? Instead of just listing and summarizing items, do I assess them, discussing strengths and weaknesses? Have I cited and discussed studies contrary to my perspective? Will the reader find my literature review relevant, appropriate, and useful?
Ask yourself questions like these about each book or article you include:
Has the author formulated a problem/issue? 2. Is it clearly defined? Is its significance (scope and relevance) clearly established? 3. Could the problem have been approached more effectively from another perspective? 4. What is the author's research orientation (e.g., interpretive, critical, combination)? 5. What is the author's theoretical framework (e.g., political, developmental, evaluative)? 6. What is the relationship between the theoretical and research perspectives?
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Has the author evaluated the literature relevant to the problem/issue? Does the author include literature taking positions she or he does not agree with? 8. In the research paper, how good are the basic components of the study design (e.g., population, intervention, outcome)? How accurate and valid are the measurements? Is the analysis of the data accurate and relevant to the research question? Are the conclusions validly based upon the data and analysis? 9. In materials written for popular readership, does the author use appeals to emotion, one-sided examples, or rhetorically-charged language and tone? Is there an objective basis to the reasoning, or is the author merely "proving" what he or she already believes?
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10. How
does the author structure the argument? Can you "deconstruct" the flow of the argument to see whether or where it breaks down logically (e.g., in establishing cause-effect relationships)? 11. In what ways does this book or article contribute to your understanding of the problem under study, and in what ways is it useful for practice? What are its strengths and limitations? 12. How does this book or article relate to the specific thesis or question I am developing?
The first step towards writing a literature review would be to select already published literature on a particular subject. Once you do this, the next step would be to collect all the research materials that have already been published by experts of the subject.
You need not stick only to books for collecting information, rather you can make use of the facilities offered by the Internet, where you can find the information you want. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that this information that you have gathered is relevant as well as reliable.
Before writing the literature review, read every piece of literature related to your subject. It is important to acquire detailed information about every aspect of that particular subject. Once you feel that you have understood the issues very well, it is time to put your analysis on paper. Your review paper should be an amalgamation of the summary and critical review of related literature.
The literature review should first summarize whatever knowledge you have gathered from the existing literature reviews. Followed by this would be the critical evaluation that you have done. This part should not include what others have said about the particular subject, but your point of view.
It should reflect your perspective and what you think about it. One should remember that every paragraph in the literature review should relate to the thesis statement you want to pursue.
While writing the literature review, one can mention some related reviews to explain or prove a point of view. However, it is important to acknowledge the fact that you have borrowed the idea from someone else. This is called citation and an important part of literature review.
The citation method that you would have to follow could be different in different institutions. You may be asked to follow the APA style or the MLA style, according to which you prefer for the bibliography and other required documentation.
Concluding the Literature Review
Summarize major contributions of significant studies and articles to the body of knowledge under review, maintaining the focus established in the introduction. Evaluate the current "state of the art on the body of knowledge reviewed, pointing out major methodological flaws or gaps in research, inconsistencies in theory and findings, and areas or issues pertinent to future study. Conclude by providing some insights into the relationship between the central topic of the literature review and a larger area of study such as a discipline, a scientific endeavor, or a profession.
Summary of Literature Review

HOW CAN I WRITE A GOOD LITERATURE REVIEW? You should use the literature to explain your research - after all, you are not writing a literature review just to show what other researchers have done. You aim should be to: 1. Show why your research needs to be carried out, 2. How you choose certain methodologies or theories to work with, 3. How your work adds to the research already carried out, etc.
Read with a purpose: you need to summarize the work you read but you must also decide which ideas or information are important to your research (so you can emphasize them), and which are less important and can be covered briefly or left out of your review.
You should also look for the major concepts, conclusions, theories, arguments etc. that underlie the work, and look for similarities and differences among closely related work. This is difficult when you start reading, but should become easier the more you read.
Write with a purpose: your aim should be to evaluate and show relationships between the work already done (Is Researcher Y's theory more convincing than Researcher X's? Did Researcher X build on the work of Researcher Y?) and between this work and your own. In order to do this effectively you should carefully plan how you are going to organize your work.
A lot of people like to organize their work chronologically (using time as their organizing system). Unless developments over time are crucial to explain the context of your research problem, using a chronological system will not be an effective way to organize your work.
Some people choose to organize their work alphabetically by author name: this system will not allow you to show the relationships between the work of different researchers, and your work, and should be avoided! Organize your work around thematic areas!

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Literature Review

What is a review of the literature?

Purpose of Literature Review

A literature review must do these things:

Ask yourself questions like these:

Concluding the Literature Review

Summary of Literature Review

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