The Types of Sources You Select When Conducting a Literature Review Will Depend on Which Factors?
What Is a Literature Review | Stride-past-Step Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to place relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing inquiry.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and periodical articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you institute. There are v key steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A skilful literature review doesn't just summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to requite a clear picture of the country of noesis on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or research newspaper, you will have to behave a literature review to situate your research inside existing knowledge. The literature review gives you lot 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 enquiry addresses a gap or contributes to a argue
You might likewise accept to write a literature review as a stand up-alone assignment. 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 will look slightly dissimilar in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a specially of import skill if you want to utilize for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Step 1: Search for relevant literature
Before you begin searching for literature, you demand a clearly defined topic.
If y'all are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research newspaper, you lot will search for literature related to your enquiry problem and questions.
If you are writing a literature review equally a stand-lonely assignment, you will have 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 information. Yous should be able to answer it based but on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Beginning past creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you're interested in, and list whatsoever synonyms and related terms. You tin add to this list if you observe new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Trunk paradigm, self-perception, self-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 articles 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, engineering and computer science)
You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to observe sources that contain more than than i keyword (e.g. social media AND body image AND generation Z)
- OR: to notice sources that contain one of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing certain terms (e.m. apple Non fruit)
Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful volume or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To identify the most of import publications on your topic, accept note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles continue appearing in your reading, brand sure to seek them out.
Receive feedback on language, structure and formatting
Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:
- Bookish style
- Vague sentences
- Grammar
- Fashion consistency
See an case
Stride 2: Evaluate and select sources
You lot probably won't exist able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—yous'll have to evaluate which sources are about relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask 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 inquiry use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does information technology confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your agreement of the topic? What are its fundamental insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the enquiry?
Make sure the sources you lot use are apparent, and make certain you read whatever landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You tin can find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a high citation count ways the commodity has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.
The telescopic of your review volition depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences yous usually simply review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in significant over time).
Have notes and cite your sources
As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that y'all can subsequently incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile total citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps yous remember what you lot read and saves time later on in the procedure.
Step 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's argument and structure, you demand to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you'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 pop over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where practice sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are in that location any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that demand to exist addressed?
This step volition assist you piece of work out the construction of your literature review and (if applicable) testify how your ain research volition contribute to existing noesis.
- Near inquiry has focused on young women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- But in that location 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 ain inquiry.
Stride 4: Outline your literature review'southward structure
There are diverse approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You should take a rough idea of your strategy before y'all start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, just each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over time. However, if y'all choose this strategy, be conscientious to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.
Try to analyze patterns, turning points and central 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 can organize your literature review into subsections that address dissimilar aspects of the topic.
For instance, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, central themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economical admission.
Methodological
If you lot draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of inquiry methods, yous might desire to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from unlike approaches. For case:
- Await at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Split up the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is ofttimes the foundation for a theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step 5: Write your literature review
Like any other bookish text, your literature review should have an introduction, a master body, and a conclusion. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly plant the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Trunk
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to dissever the body into subsections. You can employ a subheading for each theme, time menstruum, or methodological approach.
As you write, you can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main 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 as a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the conclusion, y'all 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 before submitting. Not a language skillful? Check out Scribbr's professional person Proofreading & Editing service!
Free lecture slides
This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students nigh writing a literature review.
Scribbr slides are gratis to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.
Open up Google Slides Download PowerPoint
Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to acquit a literature review at the beginning of a enquiry projection:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you're not only repeating what others have already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your enquiry 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 it will contribute.
Is this article helpful?
Y'all have already voted. Thanks :-) Your vote is saved :-) Processing your vote...
Source: https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/
0 Response to "The Types of Sources You Select When Conducting a Literature Review Will Depend on Which Factors?"
Post a Comment