Networks for School Improvement a Review of the Literature
What Is a Literature Review | Step-past-Step Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of current noesis, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and periodical articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what yous constitute. There are five central steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Place themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A good literature review doesn't merely summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear film of the country of knowledge on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When y'all write a thesis, dissertation, or inquiry paper, you will have to behave a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a run a risk 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 research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
You lot might likewise have to write a literature review as a stand-lone consignment. In this example, the purpose is to evaluate the electric current land of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content volition look slightly different in each case, but the procedure of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly of import skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Stride 1: Search for relevant literature
Before you lot brainstorm searching for literature, you lot need a conspicuously defined topic.
If yous are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research newspaper, you volition search for literature related to your research trouble and questions.
If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you lot volition accept to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to exist accountable without collecting original information. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a listing of keywords
Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables yous're interested in, and list whatever synonyms and related terms. You lot tin can add to this list if y'all discover new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- 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 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, applied science and computer science)
Yous tin employ boolean operators to assist narrow down your search:
- AND: to observe sources that contain more than ane keyword (east.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)
- Non: to exclude results containing certain terms (e.chiliad. apple NOT fruit)
Read the abstract to discover out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you observe a useful book or article, you tin can bank check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To identify the almost important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or manufactures keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
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Step two: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't exist able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you'll have to evaluate which sources are most 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 employ 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 challenge established noesis?
- How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its cardinal insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the inquiry?
Make sure the sources yous employ are credible, and make sure y'all read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You tin can discover out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a loftier commendation 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 field: in the sciences you usually only review contempo literature, just in the humanities y'all might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in significant over time).
Take notes and cite your sources
As yous read, you should besides begin the writing procedure. Have notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to keep runway of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. Information technology can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile total citation data and write a paragraph of summary and assay for each source. This helps you call up what you read and saves time afterwards in the process.
Step 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's argument and structure, you need to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you tin 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 will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicative) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Well-nigh inquiry has focused on immature women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- But there is still a lack of robust enquiry on highly visual platforms similar Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could accost in your own research.
Footstep iv: Outline your literature review's construction
There are diverse approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You should have a crude thought of your strategy before you commencement writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might exist thematic, simply each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest arroyo is to trace the development of the topic over time. Nevertheless, if y'all cull this strategy, be careful to avoid but listing and summarizing sources in order.
Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that take 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 tin can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For case, if you lot 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 describe your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of inquiry methods, y'all might desire to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:
- Wait at what results take 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. Yous can utilize it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You lot 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 academic 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 constitute the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Torso
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can utilise a subheading for each theme, time menses, or methodological approach.
Every bit you lot write, you tin 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 merely 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 depict connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the conclusion, yous should summarize the key 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 skillful? Check out Scribbr's professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
At that place are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the showtime of a research project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that yous're non only repeating what others have 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 primal 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.
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