The Report of a Literature Review Can Be Organized by Having a Separate Section for Each
What Is a Literature Review | Pace-by-Pace Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you lot to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. At that place are five key steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the construction
- Write your literature review
A good literature review doesn't but summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to requite a clear picture of the state of noesis on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or research newspaper, you lot will have to conduct a literature review to situate your enquiry within 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 enquiry
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Bear witness how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a contend
You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone 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 look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in inquiry.
Stride ane: Search for relevant literature
Before you begin searching for literature, you need a conspicuously divers topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your enquiry problem and questions.
If you lot are writing a literature review as a stand-lone assignment, y'all will have to choose a focus and develop a central 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 respond it based only on a review of existing publications.
Brand a list of keywords
Start by creating a listing of keywords related to your enquiry question. Include each of the key concepts or variables yous're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. Y'all tin can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body prototype, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to brainstorm searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your academy's 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)
You can utilise boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to observe sources that contain more than one keyword (e.g. social media AND body image AND generation Z)
- OR: to find sources that incorporate one of a range of synonyms (due east.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing certain terms (e.g. apple Non fruit)
Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you observe a useful book or article, yous tin bank check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To identify the about important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the aforementioned authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
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Step 2: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't be able to read admittedly everything that has been written on the topic—you'll accept to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask 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 utilise established frameworks or have 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 claiming 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 certain the sources you use are credible, and make certain yous read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You can detect out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a high citation count means the commodity has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.
The scope of your review volition depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually merely review contempo literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).
Take notes and cite your sources
Every bit you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that y'all can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. Information technology tin be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you call up what you read and saves time afterwards in the process.
Step three: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To brainstorm organizing your literature review'southward argument and construction, yous need to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, y'all tin 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 practise sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are at that place whatever influential theories or studies that changed the management of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are in that location weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) testify how your own research volition contribute to existing knowledge.
- Nigh inquiry 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 you could address in your own research.
Stride 4: Outline your literature review's structure
In that location are various approaches to organizing the trunk of a literature review. Y'all should have a rough idea of your strategy before you beginning writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you tin combine several of these strategies (for instance, 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, exist careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in social club.
Endeavour to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your estimation of how and why sure developments occurred.
Thematic
If you have plant some recurring central themes, you lot tin can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if you are reviewing literature nearly inequalities in migrant wellness outcomes, key 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 variety of research methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For case:
- Look at what results take emerged in qualitative versus quantitative enquiry
- Hash out 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 can use information technology to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of primal concepts.
Y'all might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step five: 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 conspicuously establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, you lot might desire to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.
Every bit you write, you tin follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the master points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Analyze and translate: don't just paraphrase other researchers—add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature equally a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to describe connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings y'all 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 earlier submitting. Not a linguistic communication practiced? Check out Scribbr'due south professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that y'all're not just repeating what others have already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved issues 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 research and what new insights information technology will contribute.
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