5 Best Practices for Conducting a Literature Review
What Is a Literature Review | Step-by-Footstep 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 equally books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what yous found. At that place are 5 key steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A practiced literature review doesn't merely summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture show of the state of knowledge on the bailiwick.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you lot write a thesis, dissertation, or inquiry paper, you will take to bear 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 enquiry
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
You lot might also take to write a literature review as a stand up-solitary 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 instance, simply the process of conducting a literature review follows the aforementioned steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you lot want to utilise for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Pace 1: Search for relevant literature
Earlier you begin searching for literature, yous need a clearly divers topic.
If y'all are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or enquiry paper, y'all volition search for literature related to your inquiry trouble and questions.
If you are writing a literature review as a stand-lonely consignment, you volition have to choose a focus and develop a cardinal question to straight your search. Different a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. Y'all should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.
Brand a list of keywords
Start past creating a listing of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables yous're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. Yous can add together to this listing if y'all detect new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Torso image, self-perception, cocky-esteem, mental wellness
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and manufactures include:
- Your university's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, applied science and calculator science)
You tin utilise boolean operators to help narrow downward your search:
- AND: to notice sources that contain more than than one keyword (e.grand. social media AND body image AND generation Z)
- OR: to find sources that comprise i of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing sure terms (e.k. apple NOT fruit)
Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you lot notice a useful book or article, you lot can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To identify the well-nigh important publications on your topic, take notation of recurring citations. If the aforementioned authors, books or articles continue appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
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Step ii: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you lot'll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.
For each publication, inquire yourself:
- What question or trouble 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 use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the written report?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your agreement of the topic? What are its cardinal insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make sure the sources you apply are credible, and brand sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
Y'all can find 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 exist included in your literature review.
The telescopic of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences y'all commonly only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for case, to trace how a concept has inverse in meaning over time).
Accept notes and cite your sources
Equally you read, y'all should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to proceed track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It tin can be helpful to brand an annotated bibliography, where yous compile full citation data and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you lot remember what you read and saves time later in the procedure.
Step 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review'southward argument and structure, you need to understand the connections and relationships betwixt the sources you lot've read. Based on your reading and notes, you can 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 direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are at that place weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This stride will assist you work out the construction of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Most inquiry has focused on immature women.
- At that place is an increasing involvement in the visual aspects of social media.
- Merely there is even so 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.
Step four: Outline your literature review'southward structure
In that location are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Y'all should accept a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you lot can combine several of these strategies (for instance, your overall construction might be thematic, merely each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest arroyo is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if yous cull this strategy, be careful to avert only listing and summarizing sources in order.
Try to analyze 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 you have found some recurring central themes, you lot can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if y'all are reviewing literature well-nigh 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 unlike disciplines or fields that utilize a diverseness of inquiry methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from dissimilar approaches. For example:
- Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Discuss 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 can utilize information technology to discuss 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 inquiry.
Stride 5: Write your literature review
Similar any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a principal body, and a decision. 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.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous might want to carve up the trunk into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time flow, or methodological approach.
As you write, yous can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the principal 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 depict connections, comparisons and contrasts
Determination
In the conclusion, you should summarize the cardinal 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 adept? Check out Scribbr'due south professional person Proofreading & Editing service!
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Ofttimes asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a inquiry project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current country of cognition on your topic
- To ensure that yous're not only repeating what others have already washed
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved issues that your research tin 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 piece of work relates to existing enquiry and what new insights it will contribute.
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