How Does a Literature Review Benifit the Reader
What Is a Literature Review | Step-past-Stride Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of electric current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and periodical articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what yous found. There are five fundamental steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Place themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the construction
- Write your literature review
A proficient literature review doesn't simply summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the land of cognition on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, yous will take to carry a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a hazard 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 debate
You might also have to write a literature review every bit a stand up-lonely assignment. In this instance, the purpose is to evaluate the current country of research and demonstrate your noesis of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a especially important skill if you lot desire to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Step 1: Search for relevant literature
Earlier you brainstorm searching for literature, you need a conspicuously defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or inquiry paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions.
If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, yous will 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 exist able to respond information technology based but on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Showtime by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the central concepts or variables yous're interested in, and listing any synonyms and related terms. You tin 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 image, self-perception, self-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 (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer scientific discipline)
You lot can apply boolean operators to assistance narrow down your search:
- AND: to discover sources that contain more than than one keyword (e.g. social media AND trunk epitome AND generation Z)
- OR: to notice sources that incorporate one of a range of synonyms (due east.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing sure terms (e.thousand. apple tree NOT fruit)
Read the abstract to discover out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, y'all can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To identify the near important publications on your topic, accept annotation of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles go on actualization 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 absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you'll take to evaluate which sources are about relevant to your questions.
For each publication, inquire 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 use 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 ostend, 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?
Brand certain the sources you utilize are credible, and brand sure y'all read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You tin find out how many times an commodity 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 lot usually merely review contempo literature, only in the humanities y'all might take a long historical perspective (for instance, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).
Take notes and cite your sources
As yous read, you should also brainstorm the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to continue rails of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It 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 remember what you read and saves time afterward in the process.
Stride 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's statement and structure, you lot demand to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, yous tin can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do sure approaches become 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 at that place 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 exist addressed?
This pace volition aid yous work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicative) testify how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Nigh research has focused on immature women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Only there is still a lack of robust enquiry on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.
Step 4: Outline your literature review'southward structure
In that location are various approaches to organizing the torso of a literature review. You should have a crude idea of your strategy earlier you start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous can combine several of these strategies (for case, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. Nonetheless, if y'all cull this strategy, be careful to avoid merely listing and summarizing sources in order.
Endeavor to clarify 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 yous have found some recurring central themes, yous tin can organize your literature review into subsections that address dissimilar aspects of the topic.
For example, if you lot are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, linguistic communication barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If you depict your sources from different disciplines or fields that utilize a variety of research methods, you might desire to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:
- Look at what results take emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Talk over 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 ofttimes the foundation for a theoretical framework. You tin can use it to talk over various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You might fence for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Footstep 5: Write your literature review
Like whatever other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a main trunk, and a conclusion. What y'all 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.
Torso
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. Y'all tin use a subheading for each theme, time menses, or methodological approach.
Equally y'all write, you can 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 interpret: don't but paraphrase other researchers—add together your own interpretations where possible, 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: employ transition words and topic sentences to describe connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the determination, yous should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When you've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language proficient? Bank check out Scribbr'due south professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Ofttimes asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
In that location are several reasons to bear a literature review at the beginning of a research projection:
- To familiarize yourself with the electric current land of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you're non just repeating what others accept already washed
- To place gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems 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 inquiry and what new insights information technology will contribute.
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