A literature review is an overview of the previously published works on a specific topic. The term can refer to a full scholarly paper or a section of a scholarly work such as a book, or an article. Either way, a literature review is supposed to provide the researcher/author and the audiences with a general image of the existing knowledge on the topic under question.
A good literature review can ensure that a proper research question has been asked and a proper theoretical framework and/or research methodology have been chosen. To be precise, a literature review serves to situate the current study within the body of the relevant literature and to provide context for the reader. In such case, the review usually precedes the methodology and results sections of the work. This book is a step-by-step guide to writing a literature review, and includes tips for modifying the process as needed depending on your audience, purpose, and goals.
The lessons in this book can be applied to writing the background section for a thesis or an original research publication. Literature reviews are now much more challenging to compile today than they used to be. You need a structured approach to handle the sheer volume of published research available. This book will help you formulate a strategy for making decisions about what to include and not include in your review, and produce a reliable and unbiased summary of the existing research. You will learn skills for defining research questions, using search tools and managing citations.
This book is part of the American Psychological Association's Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research series. Aimed at undergraduate students in research methods courses or others with a lab or research project, each book describes a key stage in the research process. Collectively, these books provide a solid grounding in research from start to finish. The specific organization of a literature review depends on the type and purpose of the review, as well as on the specific field or topic being reviewed. But in general, it is a relatively brief but thorough exploration of past and current work on a topic.
Rather than a chronological listing of previous work, though, literature reviews are usually organized thematically, such as different theoretical approaches, methodologies, or specific issues or concepts involved in the topic. A thematic organization makes it much easier to examine contrasting perspectives, theoretical approaches, methodologies, findings, etc, and to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of, and point out any gaps in, previous research. Such work is outside the scope of this article, which focuses on literature reviews to inform reports of original medical education research. We define such a literature review as a synthetic review and summary of what is known and unknown regarding the topic of a scholarly body of work, including the current work's place within the existing knowledge. While this type of literature review may not require the intensive search processes mandated by systematic reviews, it merits a thoughtful and rigorous approach. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have explored while researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within a larger field of study.
There are many different types of literature reviews, including those that focus solely on methodology, those that are more conceptual, and those that are more exploratory. Regardless of the type of literature review or how many sources it contains, strong literature reviews have similar characteristics. Your literature review is, at its most fundamental level, an original work based on an extensive critical examination and synthesis of the relevant literature on a topic. As a study of the research on a particular topic, it is arranged by key themes or findings, which should lead up to or link to the research question.
The literature review is a written overview of major writings and other sources on a selected topic. Sources covered in the review may include scholarly journal articles, books, government reports, Web sites, etc. The literature review provides a description, summary and evaluation of each source.
It is usually presented as a distinct section of a graduate thesis or dissertation. Literature refers to a collection of published information/materials on a particular area of research or topic, such as books and journal articles of academic value. However, your literature review does not need to be inclusive of every article and book that has been written on your topic because that will be too broad. Rather, it should include the key sources highlighting the main debates, trends and gaps in your specific research area.
Figure 2.6 Small Sample of the Thousands of Professional Journals That Publish Research in Psychology and Related FieldsMost professional journals in psychology undergo a process ofdouble-blind peer review. Researchers who want to publish their work in the journal submit a manuscript to the editor—who is generally an established researcher too—who in turn sends it to two or three experts on the topic. Each reviewer reads the manuscript, writes a critical but constructive review, and sends the review back to the editor along with his or her recommendations. The editor then decides whether to accept the article for publication, ask the authors to make changes and resubmit it for further consideration, or reject it outright. In any case, the editor forwards the reviewers' written comments to the researchers so that they can revise their manuscript accordingly.
This entire process is double-blind, as the reviewers do not know the identity of the researcher, and vice versa. Double-blind peer review is helpful because it ensures that the work meets basic standards of the field before it can enter the research literature. A literature review is much more than an annotated bibliography or a list of separate reviews of articles and books.
It is a critical, analytical summary and synthesis of the current knowledge of a topic. Thus it should compare and relate different theories, findings, etc, rather than just summarize them individually. In addition, it should have a particular focus or theme to organize the review. It does not have to be an exhaustive account of everything published on the topic, but it should discuss all the significant academic literature important for that focus.
It demonstrates that you can systematically explore the research in your topic area, read and analyze the literature on the topic, use it to inform your own work, and gather enough knowledge about the topic to conduct a research project. Literature reviews should be reasonably complete, and not restricted to a few journals, a few years, or a specific methodology or research design. The review can also provide potential answers to your research question, help identify theories that have previously been used to address similar questions, as well as provide evidence to inform policy or decision-making . In the literature review, a researcher shows she is familiar with a body of knowledge and thereby establishes her credibility with a reader. Literature reviews are often necessary for real world social work practice.
Grant proposals, advocacy briefs, and evidence-based practice rely on a review of the literature to accomplish practice goals. Scholarly or academic peer-reviewed articles will often be a part of the research paper. An entire paper that is only a literature review is called a "review article" and they tell the reader the current state of understanding about a topic. Many researchers struggle when it comes to writing literature review for their research paper.
A literature review is a comprehensive overview of all the knowledge available on a specific topic till date. Literature review is one of the pillars on which your research idea stands since it provides context, relevance, and background to the research problem you are exploring. Scholarly booksare books written by researchers and practitioners mainly for use by other researchers and practitioners. Although edited volumes can also give a coherent presentation of the topic, it is not unusual for each chapter to take a different perspective or even for the authors of different chapters to openly disagree with each other. In general, scholarly books undergo a peer review process similar to that used by professional journals. Many search tools include options for viewing citations of selected articles.
Examining cited references provides additional articles for review and a sense of the influence of the selected article on its field. You should also look for empirical research reports addressing your question or similar questions, which can give you ideas about how to operationally define your variables and collect your data. As a general rule, it is good to use methods that others have already used successfully unless you have good reasons not to. Finally, you should look for sources that provide information that can help you argue for the interestingness of your research question. For a study on the effects of cell phone use on driving ability, for example, you might look for information about how widespread cell phone use is, how frequent and costly motor vehicle crashes are, and so on.
One of the additional benefits derived from doing the literature review is that it will quickly reveal which researchers have written the most on a particular topic and are, therefore, probably the experts on the topic. Someone who has written twenty articles on a topic or on related topics is more than likely more knowledgeable than someone who has written a single article. This same writer will likely turn up as a reference in most of the other articles written on the same topic. You've decided to focus your literature review on materials dealing with sperm whales. This is because you've just finished reading Moby Dick, and you wonder if that whale's portrayal is really real. You start with some articles about the physiology of sperm whales in biology journals written in the 1980's.
But these articles refer to some British biological studies performed on whales in the early 18th century. This makes you wonder about American whaling methods during the time portrayed in Moby Dick, so you find some academic articles published in the last five years on how accurately Herman Melville portrayed the whaling scene in his novel. Literature reviews provide you with a handy guide to a particular topic. If you have limited time to conduct research, literature reviews can give you an overview or act as a stepping stone.
For professionals, they are useful reports that keep them up to date with what is current in the field. For scholars, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. Literature reviews also provide a solid background for a research paper's investigation. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers. A comprehensive approach requires the review of numerous sources (e.g. books and articles), which can be presented as a substantial chapter in a research thesis or published on its own as a scholarly article. Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible.
This is particularly true in disciplines in medicine and the sciences where research conducted becomes obsolete very quickly as new discoveries are made. However, when writing a review in the social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be required. In other words, a complete understanding the research problem requires you to deliberately examine how knowledge and perspectives have changed over time. Sort through other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to explore what is considered by scholars to be a "hot topic" and what is not.
This is a difficult question because it depends on how extensively your topic has been studied and also on your own goals. One study found that across a variety of professional journals in psychology, the average number of sources cited per article was about 50 (Adair & Vohra, 2003). This gives a rough idea of what professional researchers consider to be adequate. As a student, you might be assigned a much lower minimum number of references to use, but the principles for selecting the most useful ones remain the same. The primary method used to search the research literature involves using one or more electronic databases. These include Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, and ProQuest for all academic disciplines, ERIC for education, and PubMed for medicine and related fields.
The most important for our purposes, however, is PsycINFO, which is produced by the APA. PsycINFO is so comprehensive—covering thousands of professional journals and scholarly books going back more than 100 years—that for most purposes its content is synonymous with the research literature in psychology. Like most such databases, PsycINFO is usually available through your university library. A literature review is a compilation of the most significant previously published research on your topic. Unlike an annotated bibliography or a research paper you may have written in other classes, your literature review will outline, evaluate, and synthesize relevant research and relate those sources to your own research question.
A good literature review lays the solidifies the importance of the problem your study aims to address, defines the main ideas of your research question, and demonstrates their interrelationships. To facilitate writing a literature review, journals are increasingly providing helpful features to guide authors. Additionally, many institutions have writing centers that provide web-based materials on writing a literature review, and some even have writing coaches. When selecting references for the introduction consider those that illustrate core background theoretical and methodological concepts, as well as recent relevant studies.
For the discussion, citations should be thoughtfully selected to compare and contrast the present study's findings with the current literature and to indicate how the present study moves the field forward. In preparing to write a research paper, it is important to consider which citations to include and how they will inform the introduction and discussion sections. The "Instructions to Authors" for the targeted journal will often provide guidance on structuring the literature review and the number of total citations permitted for each article category. Reviewing articles of similar type published in the targeted journal can also provide guidance regarding structure and average lengths of the introduction and discussion sections. However, there are three common mistakes that researchers make when including literature reviews in the discussion section.
First, they mention all sorts of studies, some of which are not even relevant to the topic under investigation. Second, instead of citing the original article, they cite a related article that mentions the original article. Lastly, some authors cite previous work solely based on the abstract, without even going through the entire paper. The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn't work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way.
You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources. There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline's conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.
Literature Review Meaning In Research A literature review, like a term paper, is usually organized around ideas, not the sources themselves as an annotated bibliography would be organized. This means that you will not just simply list your sources and go into detail about each one of them, one at a time. As you read widely but selectively in your topic area, consider instead what themes or issues connect your sources together. How well do they present the material and do they portray it according to an appropriate theory?
Pick one of these themes to focus the organization of your review. Whether you have clearly defined your research question or not, begin your search using academic databases such as JSTOR, EBSCOhost, or ERIC. Your university library system should provide you with a login that may give you free access to articles you would normally have to pay for through these databases. Use the search feature in the academic database to search only for studies published in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals ensure that these studies underwent extensive scrutiny and were combed for best practices.
Skim article abstracts to find studies that relate to your topic before downloading and organizing your findings. The purpose of a literature review is to provide a review of writings on the given topic in order to establish the reviewer's own position in the existing field of scholarship on that topic. A literature review provides a reader with a comprehensive look at previous discussions prior to the one the reviewer will be making in his/her own research paper, thesis, or dissertation. In short, a literature review shows readers where the reviewer is entering the academic conversation on a particular topic in the context of existing scholarship. In a larger piece of written work, such as a dissertation or project, a literature review is usually one of the first tasks carried out after deciding on a topic. Reading combined with critical analysis can help to refine a topic and frame research questions.
A literature review establishes familiarity with and understanding of current research in a particular field before carrying out a new investigation. Conducting a literature review should enable you to find out what research has already been done and identify what is unknown within your topic. A good literature review summarises, analyses, evaluates and synthesises the relevant literature within a particular field of research.
It illuminates how knowledge has evolved within the field, highlighting what has already been done, what is generally accepted, what is emerging and what is the current state of thinking on the topic. Additionally, literature reviews identify the gaps in the current knowledge - that is, uninvestigated or under-researched areas. In composing a literature review, it is important to note that it is often this third layer of knowledge that is cited as "true" even though it often has only a loose relationship to the primary studies and secondary literature reviews. Given this, while literature reviews are designed to provide an overview and synthesis of pertinent sources you have explored, there are a number of approaches you could adopt depending upon the type of analysis underpinning your study. First, it is best to focus on recent research, keeping in mind that what counts as recent depends on the topic. For newer topics that are actively being studied, "recent" might mean published in the past year or two.
