What Is the Objective of a Literature Review
How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Video, & Template
What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of electric current knowledge, allowing y'all to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
There are five cardinal steps to writing a literature review:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A adept literature review doesn't merely summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a articulate picture of the state of knowledge on the discipline.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, you will likely have to carry a literature review to situate your inquiry inside existing knowledge. The literature review gives yous a risk to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
- Position your piece of work in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Show how your inquiry addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
- Evaluate the current state of inquiry and demonstrate your noesis of the scholarly debates effectually your topic.
Writing literature reviews is a especially important skill if yous want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in inquiry.
Step ane – Search for relevant literature
Earlier you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly divers topic.
If you are writing the literature review department of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your inquiry problem and questions.
Make a list of keywords
Commencement past creating a list of keywords related to your enquiry question. Include each of the key concepts or variables y'all're interested in, and listing any synonyms and related terms. You tin can add together to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body paradigm, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- 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 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 informatics)
You tin can too use boolean operators to aid narrow down your search.
Make sure to read the abstruse to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When y'all find a useful book or article, you can bank check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
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Step two – Evaluate and select sources
Yous likely won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it volition exist necessary to evaluate which sources are near relevant to your research question.
For each publication, enquire yourself:
- What question or problem is the author addressing?
- What are the cardinal concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the cardinal theories, models, and methods?
- Does the enquiry 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 it confirm, add to, or claiming established knowledge?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make certain the sources y'all utilize are credible, and make sure you read whatsoever landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
Take notes and cite your sources
As you read, yous should also brainstorm the writing process. Have notes that you tin later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to go on track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. Information technology can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full commendation data and write a paragraph of summary and assay for each source. This helps you lot remember what you read and saves fourth dimension afterwards in the process.
Step 3 – Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's statement and construction, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you can wait for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): practice certain approaches get more or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where exercise 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 step will help y'all 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.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Simply there is nonetheless 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's construction
There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, yous can combine several of these strategies (for instance, your overall structure might be thematic, only each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over fourth dimension. Nevertheless, if yous cull this strategy, be conscientious to avoid merely listing and summarizing sources in gild.
Endeavor to clarify patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Requite your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you take establish some recurring cardinal themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if y'all 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 use a diversity of inquiry methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that sally from dissimilar approaches. For example:
- Expect at what results take emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Discuss how the topic has been approached past empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Dissever the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is ofttimes the foundation for a theoretical framework. You lot can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You might fence for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step 5 – Write your literature review
Like whatsoever other bookish text, your literature review should have an introduction, a principal 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.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to split the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.
Equally y'all 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 ain 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
Decision
In the determination, you should summarize the fundamental findings you accept 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 expert? Check out Scribbr'due south professional 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 kickoff of a inquiry projection:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of noesis on your topic
- To ensure that you're non only repeating what others take already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems 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 work relates to existing research and what new insights information technology will contribute.
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