Do You Review Every Source in a Literature Review
What Is a Literature Review | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current cognition, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such every bit books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are v cardinal 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 only summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the country of knowledge on the discipline.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When yous write a thesis, dissertation, or inquiry newspaper, you will have to conduct a literature review to situate your inquiry within existing noesis. 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 research
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Testify how your enquiry addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
You might also have to write a literature review equally a stand-lonely consignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current country of enquiry and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will await slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the aforementioned steps.
Writing literature reviews is a specially important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in enquiry.
Pace one: Search for relevant literature
Before y'all begin searching for literature, you demand a conspicuously defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review department of a dissertation or enquiry newspaper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions.
If you are writing a literature review every bit a stand up-lone assignment, y'all volition take to cull a focus and develop a primal question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original information. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Start by 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 can add together to this list if you find new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body image, cocky-perception, cocky-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 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 informatics)
Y'all can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to find sources that contain more than ane keyword (e.chiliad. social media AND torso image AND generation Z)
- OR: to detect sources that contain 1 of a range of synonyms (e.1000. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing certain terms (e.1000. apple tree Non fruit)
Read the abstract to observe out whether an commodity is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you tin can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To place the most 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.
What is your plagiarism score?
Compare your paper with over 60 billion web pages and thirty one thousand thousand publications.
- Best plagiarism checker of 2021
- Plagiarism report & percentage
- Largest plagiarism database
Scribbr Plagiarism Checker
Stride 2: 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 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 fundamental theories, models and methods? Does the research apply established frameworks or accept an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication chronicle to other literature in the field? Does information technology confirm, add to, or claiming 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?
Make sure the sources you use are apparent, and make sure you read whatever landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You lot tin can discover out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a loftier citation count ways the commodity 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 discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, just in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).
Accept notes and cite your sources
As yous read, y'all should also begin the writing procedure. Take notes that you tin can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
Information technology is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It can exist helpful to brand an annotated bibliography, where you compile full citation data and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you lot retrieve what you lot read and saves time afterwards in the procedure.
Step 3: Place themes, debates, and gaps
To brainstorm organizing your literature review'southward argument and structure, you lot need to empathize the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you can expect for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): practice certain approaches become more than or less popular 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 inverse the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that demand to be addressed?
This footstep will help you piece of work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own inquiry will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Most research has focused on immature women.
- At that place 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 address in your ain research.
Pace 4: Outline your literature review's structure
At that place are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Y'all should have a rough idea of your strategy before yous kickoff writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you tin can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, only each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you cull this strategy, be conscientious to avert simply listing and summarizing sources in order.
Try to clarify patterns, turning points and cardinal debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Requite your estimation of how and why sure developments occurred.
Thematic
If y'all take plant some recurring key themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address unlike aspects of the topic.
For example, if you lot are reviewing literature almost inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If you draw your sources from dissimilar disciplines or fields that use a variety of enquiry methods, you 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
- Talk over 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 often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You can apply it to discuss diverse theories, models, and definitions of primal 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 accept an introduction, a main body, and a determination. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly found 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 use a subheading for each theme, fourth dimension period, or methodological arroyo.
Every bit you write, you can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the master 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 every bit a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: utilize transition words and topic sentences to describe connections, comparisons and contrasts
Determination
In the determination, you should summarize the key findings y'all 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 linguistic communication expert? Check out Scribbr'south professional Proofreading & Editing service!
Free lecture slides
This article has been adjusted into lecture slides that you can utilize to teach your students about writing a literature review.
Scribbr slides are gratuitous to apply, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.
Open up Google Slides Download PowerPoint
Oft asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the outset of a inquiry project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current land of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you're not just repeating what others have already washed
- To identify gaps in noesis and unresolved issues 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 work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.
Is this article helpful?
Y'all have already voted. Thank you :-) Your vote is saved :-) Processing your vote...
sullivanhungs1936.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/
0 Response to "Do You Review Every Source in a Literature Review"
Post a Comment