Literature review is one of the most crucial steps when conducting any type of academic study. Regardless of whether you want to carry out a desk based research or you intend to actually go to the field you must review the available relevant literature. Writing a literature review is not as simple as it sounds but if you are a student and you would like to learn how to go about it, then you might be glad to hear that you’ve come to the right place as we are willing to guide you on how to conduct a literature review.
The basic aim of literature review is to provide a brief overview of the various current studies that are relevant to your topic. Reviewing the existing relevant literature among other things also helps you to explain the importance of your study. In other words, justification of your study is facilitated by reviewing the literature that is related to your work. Moreover, literature review helps students and researchers alike to identify areas of study that are in need of further research.
Notably, most students and novice researchers confuse between literature review and annotated bibliography. It is worth to point out that these two are quite different. Literature review provides an overview of the current source materials that are relevant to your topic or area of study and also describes the knowledge gap that one wishes to fill by conducting a given study. On the other hand, an annotated bibliography is a mere list of sources with a brief critique of each source and this list is normally arranged in an alphabetical order. Whereas an annotated bibliography is concerned about the quality of a given information source, literature review is interested with the ability of the given source in answering a given research question or in supporting or opposing it.
There quite a number of different types of literature reviews. Some of the types of literature review include but not limited to: integrative literature review, meta-analysis, systematic review, scoping review and traditional literature review. Integrative literature review just like the name suggests, synthesizes the findings from different studies. Specifically, integrative literature review allows researchers to synthesize quantitative studies with qualitative ones. Systematic literature reviews are more rigorous and they aim at minimizing biasness and enhancing objectivity when integrating various types of studies. A scope literature review aims at narrowing down the research topic in terms of scope. In other words, scope literature review helps researchers and students alike to identify areas that are suitable for further systematic research. Traditional literature review helps the researcher to know the various studies and various arguments and explanations that are relevant to his/her topic or area of study. Lastly, meta-analysis as a type of literature review utilizes statistical methods in synthesizing various different studies.
The first step that is involved in literature review is defining a topic. The topic must be manageable in terms of scope. It should neither be too narrow to render your research trivial nor no broad to make the study unmanageable. Brainstorming is therefore a necessary step when it comes to conducting literature review.
The second step is to determine where you want to search for literature and begin the process of searching relevant and current studies. Preferably, it is better to review sources that are not older than ten years from the date of publication. At the beginning of this step, you must come up with a plan that will help you to review the literature in a systematic manner. Such a plan can involve coming up with a list of databases that may contain information that is relevant to your research topic. This will help you in being thorough in your search.
When reviewing the literature, you should also be sure to major on scholarly sources. Such sources include books, journals as well as official statistics of government publications. One of the quickest ways of reviewing a scholarly journal is to quickly read the abstract. A quick overview of the abstract can give you a clear idea of whether that given source is relevant to your topic of study or not.
There are a number of things you ought to pay close attention to when conducting a literature review. First, you should make sure that you have understood what the various authors are trying to find out in their work. Secondly, you should note the methodology that the various authors used and whether such methodologies influenced the outcome of the study. Thirdly, you must note if there are studies that are offering conflicting ideas or arguments on the same subject and finally you are supposed to check the credibility of the author in terms of the publications and citations that he/she has.
The final step of conducting a literature review involves organizing the information gotten from the various sources. You can organize the information chronologically by events or by publication date. Here date becomes very important and the literature is organized from the oldest to the most recent. You can also organize the information thematically. Thematic organization of literature review involves categorizing various sources according to their themes. This form of organization of literature review tends to give your work a more coherent flow as opposed to other forms. Lastly, you can organize your literature review methodologically. Here, a close attention is paid to the various methods that the researchers of various sources have used.
Referencing is Crucial when Conducting a Literature Review
It is worth to note that it is of paramount importance to properly reference your literature review. Specifically, you are supposed to fully and properly acknowledge all the sources of the information as failure to do so would amount to plagiarism. It is mandatory to include a list of references at the end of your literature review. You should however check with your course instructor when writing this list as there a number of conventional referencing styles that one can use when writing a literature review. If there is a clarification that you would like made or any query in relation to how you can conduct a literature review, then we would be glad to hear from you.