What Is a Literature Review in a Research Study?
What Is a Literature Review | Step-by-Pace Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing inquiry.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what yous constitute. At that place are 5 central steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A proficient literature review doesn't merely summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When y'all write a thesis, dissertation, or inquiry paper, y'all will take to bear a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives yous a adventure 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 inquiry addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
You might as well have to write a literature review every bit a stand-alone assignment. In this example, 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 different in each case, just 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.
Step 1: Search for relevant literature
Before y'all begin searching for literature, you lot need a conspicuously defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, y'all volition search for literature related to your research problem and questions.
If you are writing a literature review equally a stand up-alone consignment, you will have to cull a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to exist answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Start by creating a listing of keywords related to your enquiry question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you're interested in, and list whatsoever synonyms and related terms. You lot can add to this list if y'all discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body epitome, self-perception, self-esteem, mental wellness
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Apply your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and manufactures include:
- Your academy's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and information science)
You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to find sources that contain more than 1 keyword (eastward.chiliad. social media AND trunk paradigm AND generation Z)
- OR: to notice sources that comprise one of a range of synonyms (e.grand. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- Non: to exclude results containing certain terms (east.grand. apple Not fruit)
Read the abstruse to notice out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you detect a useful book or article, you tin check the bibliography to detect other relevant sources.
To identify the most 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 absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you'll have to evaluate which sources are near relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or problem is the author addressing?
- What are the primal concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the cardinal theories, models and methods? Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative arroyo?
- 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 challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your agreement of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Brand certain the sources you apply are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of inquiry.
You tin can find out how many times an commodity has been cited on Google Scholar—a loftier citation count ways 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 yous usually just review contempo literature, simply in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in pregnant over fourth dimension).
Take notes and cite your sources
Equally you read, you lot should too brainstorm the writing procedure. Take notes that you lot tin subsequently incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to go on runway of your sources with citations to avert plagiarism. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where yous compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you think what you read and saves fourth dimension afterward in the process.
Step 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's argument and structure, you lot demand to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, y'all can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): practice certain approaches go more or less pop over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do 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 need to be addressed?
This footstep volition help y'all piece of work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicative) testify how your ain research volition contribute to existing knowledge.
- Nearly enquiry has focused on young women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Merely at that place is still a lack of robust inquiry 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's construction
There are diverse approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You lot should accept a rough idea of your strategy before you starting time writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for instance, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over fourth dimension. However, if you lot choose this strategy, be conscientious to avoid simply 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 estimation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you have constitute some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that accost different aspects of the topic.
For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant wellness outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If you depict your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a diverseness of research methods, yous might want to compare the results and conclusions that sally from different 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
- Split the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You can utilise it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You might debate for the relevance of a specific theoretical arroyo, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Stride five: Write your literature review
Similar any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a main trunk, and a conclusion. What you 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.
Trunk
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to separate the trunk into subsections. You tin utilize a subheading for each theme, time catamenia, or methodological approach.
As yous 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 only 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: utilize transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the determination, you should summarize the key findings you accept taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When yous've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language adept? Cheque out Scribbr's professional person 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 projection:
- To familiarize yourself with the current land of cognition on your topic
- To ensure that y'all're not only repeating what others accept already done
- 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 piece of work relates to existing enquiry and what new insights it will contribute.
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