What is Literature Review?

A literature review is a survey of current knowledge on a specific topic. Writing a literature review is the most hectic part of writing a book, thesis or dissertation. It provides an overview of existing knowledge, methods and, gaps in current literature. You can also say it is a summary of all the published work on a topic. And conducting a complete literature review is an essential step in publication and research.

It is an important part of a thesis submitted for publication to a journal. A broad literature review will show your editor and referees that you are aware of existing research in your field. There is no doubt that an effective literature review is vital to writing a good research paper. The global research output increases by 2.5 million new articles every year. So, it is highly unlikely that you have chosen a topic that no one has worked on.

Below is the description of the steps for writing a literature review.

1.      Decide your areas of research

Before starting a search for books and articles, it is advisable to work on your area of research. You can also guess your area of research from the guidelines provided by your supervisor. The introduction part of your thesis can help you too in deciding your field of research. Once you have got your area decided, search for the available sources or literature. Make sure that you only search for the books, articles, or journals related to your area. Hence, deciding on your area of interest is crucial to writing a good thesis.

Students should not make haste in choosing their area of study. Ideally, you should start considering different options of research at the beginning. You don’t need to worry much about your topic. You can consult with your teacher about this. Moreover, there are many sources available online that can assist you in choosing your topic.

2.      Broaden your search area

Suppose you are brainstorming on your topic f investigation for weeks. So, what will happen? Thinking so much about your topic may narrow down your analysis area in your mind. As a result, you might miss other areas which are relevant to your field. It is the result o overthinking that you will be missing articles that are close to your topic.

According to the dissertation help firm, your research is on how to make plastic compostable. Now, when you get your topic, the next stage is to search for online data available. Suppose, after some hectic searching, you only find two articles related to your area. Ok, this is enough to have an idea about previous knowledge in your field. But what will you write in your literature review? This material is not enough for that. So you might search for methods of plastic biodegradation to support your review part. You can also search for materials related to environmentally friendly plastics, such as bioplastic. This will help you with more relative reading. It will also help you in placing your questions in a broader framework.

3.      Search for the literature

Now, when you understand what to search for to write a literature review. It is time actually to search for the literature. You should conduct a comprehensive bibliographic search of books and articles in your area.  You can read the abstracts online, or you can download them to read them later. You should also follow the citations of literature relevant to your field. If you have managed to find a couple of relevant articles, you should see at the end of those articles. There will be more citations provided. You can follow those citations. This is the one way of finding more articles related to your field of investigation. This is helpful when you can’t get your desired articles using keywords.

You should make use of the library to find books relevant to your area and check them out. You can set a time for your search. The literature review typically takes less than two or three sessions to be completed.

4.      Make use of the right keywords

One of the problems you can face during the searching phase of your literature is irrelevant keywords. The keywords should be in line with the topics you are looking for on the internet. You can identify your keywords after defining your concept. If your topic is “Childhood Schizophrenia”, you can search using keywords such as schizophrenia or schizophrenia in children.

Keywords help you a lot in getting your desired results. One other way to obtain your field related data is, make use of double quotation marks. If you are conducting your research on

Google, using quotation marks will help you retrieve articles related to your field. You should make extensive use of keywords that you will be using in your original thesis. This indicates the relevance of those keywords in your research. It might also shine some light on whether you should be more precise in defining your concepts and keywords.

5.      Explore literature in depth

As you have read the abstracts of the articles or papers in the previous step. Now, after filtering them out, you choose the literature that best suits you. You might have been left with only a few references, but you got a more related list to your field. You can spend time on the details of each article because now you don’t have an exhaustive list of papers.

If you have got only a few references, then there is a possibility that you might have missed the important articles. If this is the case, you need to go back and search for more data. You can also make use of references given at the end of each paper and article.

One other way to explore the literature in depth is the use of a library. You should make regular use of the library to be able to write a literature review. You can search for the books related to your topic and read them. You might face a library timings problem. So, to solve this issue, you can take books with you upon registration.

6.      Code the literature

After cutting down all the unnecessary data from your list, it is time to code the literature. Coding of the data means that you are integrating your data. If you use an online source to read, you can make separate folders on your PC and code the data. You should sort all the data into similar pieces. You can pile up similar topics in a window. If there are articles you can’t figure out, then place them in a separate window. It would be best if you went over those articles and papers.

When you finish coding your data, place each stack on the table labelled with a name.

7.      Begin writing your Literature Review.

When you know the order after coding your literature, you should start writing your literature review. It doesn’t matter from where you start; you know the order of your writing. Open each data stack before you and begin writing your literature review.

It will be a lot easier to write when you follow the steps mentioned above.  You will come up with a great copy of your literature review.

Conclusion

After reading all the steps mentioned above, you would agree that literature review is a hectic process. In the conclusion part of the review, you should summarize the key findings. Last but not least, the steps mentioned above are not the only steps you can adopt. You can consult Google for more steps to write a literature review.