How Can the Literature You Reviewed Inform Your Own Planning for a Research

The Literature Review | A Complete Stride-past-Footstep Guide

Published on 22 February 2019 by Shona McCombes. Revised on iii May 2021.

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.

Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analysing publications (such as books and periodical articles) that relate to your research question. There are five master steps in the process of writing a literature review:

1. Search for relevant literature
2. Evaluate sources
3. Identify themes, debates and gaps
4. Outline the structure
5. Write your literature review

A adept literature review doesn't just summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear motion-picture show of the state of noesis on the subject.

Why write a literature review?

When you write a dissertation or thesis, you will have to acquit a literature review to situate your enquiry 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
• Testify how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might besides accept to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this instance, the purpose is to evaluate the current land of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates effectually a topic.

The content will wait slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.

Step 1: Search for relevant literature

Before y'all brainstorm searching for literature, y'all need a clearly divers topic.

If yous are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you volition search for literature related to your research objectives and questions.

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will have to cull a focus and develop a fundamental question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation inquiry question, this question has to exist answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based but on a review of existing publications.

Inquiry question example

What is the impact of social media on trunk image among Generation Z?

Make a list of keywords

Showtime by creating a listing of keywords related to your inquiry topic. Include each of the key concepts or variables you're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You lot can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

Keywords example

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, cocky-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some 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, applied science and information science)

You lot can use boolean operators to assistance narrow downwards your search:

• AND to find sources that contain more than 1 keyword (e.m. social media AND body image AND generation Z
• OR to find sources that contain i of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
• Not to exclude results containing certain terms (eastward.g. apple NOT fruit)

Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When yous discover a useful book or article, yous tin check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

To place the most of import publications on your topic, accept note of recurring citations. If the aforementioned authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make certain 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 have to evaluate which sources are well-nigh 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 enquiry use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the written report?
• How does the publication chronicle to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add together to, or challenge established knowledge?
• How does the publication contribute to your agreement of the topic? What are its central insights and arguments?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make certain the sources you utilize are credible, and brand sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can discover 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 area: in the sciences y'all normally merely review contempo literature, simply in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for case, to trace how a concept has inverse in meaning over time).

Take notes and cite your sources

As y'all read, you should also begin the writing procedure. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It'south important to go along runway of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism. Information technology can exist helpful to brand an annotated bibliography, where y'all compile full reference 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.

You tin use our gratuitous APA Reference Generator for quick, right, consistent citations.

Step 3: Identify themes, debates and gaps

To begin organising your literature review's argument and structure, you need to empathize the connections and relationships between the sources you lot've read. Based on your reading and notes, you lot can expect 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 there 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 be addressed?

This step will aid you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) bear witness how your own research will contribute to existing cognition.

Example of trends and gaps

In reviewing the literature on social media and body image, you note that:

• Most inquiry has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing involvement in the visual aspects of social media.
• Just in that location is however a lack of robust research on highly-visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that yous could accost in your own research.

Step 4: Outline your literature review's construction

There are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. You should have a crude idea of your strategy before y'all start writing.

Depending on the length of your literature review, yous can combine several of these strategies (for instance, your overall structure might be thematic, merely each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over fourth dimension. However, if yous choose this strategy, exist conscientious to avoid only listing and summarising sources in guild.

Endeavour to analyse patterns, turning points and fundamental debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Requite your estimation of how and why sure developments occurred.

Thematic

If you accept found some recurring central themes, yous tin can organise your literature review into subsections that address dissimilar 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 economical access.

Methodological

If you lot describe 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 dissimilar approaches. For example:

• Look at what results accept 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 often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You can use information technology to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You lot might contend for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your inquiry.

Footstep 5: Write your literature review

Like any other academic text, your literature review should take an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. What you lot 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.

Dissertation literature review

If you are writing the literature review as role of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You lot can emphasise the timeliness of the topic ("many contempo studies have focused on the problem of x") or highlight a gap in the literature ("while at that place has been much enquiry on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration").

Stand-alone literature review

If yous are writing a stand up-lonely paper, give some background on the topic and its importance, discuss the scope of the literature you lot will review (for example, the time period of your sources), and state your objective. What new insight will yous draw from the literature?

Body

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. Y'all can apply a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, brand sure to follow these tips:

• Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the master points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
• Analyse and interpret: don't just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations, 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 transitions and topic sentences to depict connections, comparisons and contrasts.

Instance of a paragraph in a literature review

Conclusion

In the conclusion, you should summarise the key findings y'all have taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.

Dissertation literature review

If the literature review is office of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your enquiry addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you lot take fatigued on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead directly into your methodology department.

Stand-alone literature review

If you are writing a stand-alone paper, y'all can discuss the overall implications of the literature or brand suggestions for hereafter enquiry based on the gaps yous take identified.

Oft asked questions nigh literature reviews

What is the purpose of a literature review?

There are several reasons to deport a literature review at the starting time of a research project:

• To familiarise yourself with the current state of cognition on your topic
• To ensure that you're not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your inquiry can accost
• 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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