How to Write a Research Paper With Literature Review
What Is a Literature Review | Pace-by-Footstep Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing enquiry.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such every bit books and journal manufactures), critically analyzing them, and explaining what yous found. At that place are five key 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 just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to requite a clear picture of the land of knowledge on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When y'all write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, you will have to conduct a literature review to situate your inquiry within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a gamble 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 inquiry addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
You might also take to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you lot want to utilise for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Pace ane: Search for relevant literature
Earlier you brainstorm searching for literature, yous demand a clearly defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review department of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research trouble and questions.
If you are writing a literature review every bit a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original information. You lot should be able to answer information technology based merely on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Start by creating a list of keywords related to your inquiry question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You tin can add together to this list if you observe new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Utilise your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and manufactures include:
- Your university's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economic science)
- Inspec (physics, engineering science and calculator science)
You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to find sources that contain more than ane keyword (e.1000. social media AND torso image AND generation Z)
- OR: to find sources that comprise ane of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing certain terms (e.g. apple NOT fruit)
Read the abstract to find out whether an commodity is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, yous tin can bank check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To place the most of import publications on your topic, take annotation of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, brand sure to seek them out.
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Step ii: Evaluate and select sources
Yous probably won't be able to read admittedly everything that has been written on the topic—you'll accept to evaluate which sources are well-nigh relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or problem is the author addressing?
- What are the primal concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the primal theories, models and methods? Does the research utilize established frameworks or accept an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the report?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does information technology confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the inquiry?
Make sure the sources you apply are apparent, and make certain you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of inquiry.
You tin can notice out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly exist included in your literature review.
The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you lot unremarkably but review recent literature, but in the humanities y'all might take a long historical perspective (for case, to trace how a concept has changed in significant over time).
Take notes and cite your sources
As you read, y'all should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
Information technology is of import to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. Information technology tin exist helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full citation data and write a paragraph of summary and assay for each source. This helps y'all remember what you read and saves time later in the process.
Footstep three: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's argument and structure, you need to sympathise the connections and relationships between the sources y'all've read. Based on your reading and notes, you lot tin can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): exercise sure approaches become more or less pop over fourth dimension?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where exercise sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there whatever influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This stride will assist you piece of work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Nearly research has focused on immature women.
- There is an increasing involvement in the visual aspects of social media.
- But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own inquiry.
Step four: Outline your literature review's structure
There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You lot should have a crude idea of your strategy before you start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you tin can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might exist thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over time. Still, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid just list and summarizing sources in gild.
Try to clarify patterns, turning points and fundamental debates that accept shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why sure developments occurred.
Thematic
If you take found some recurring central themes, you lot can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For instance, if yous are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant wellness outcomes, cardinal themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If you lot draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a diversity of research methods, y'all might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from dissimilar approaches. For example:
- Await at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative enquiry
- Hash out how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Split the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You lot can apply information technology to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
Yous might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step five: Write your literature review
Like whatever other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. What you lot include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, you lot might want to divide the trunk into subsections. You tin apply a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological arroyo.
As you write, y'all can 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 just 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: apply transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the decision, you should summarize the cardinal findings you accept 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 expert? Bank check out Scribbr'due south professional Proofreading & Editing service!
Gratis lecture slides
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Oftentimes asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:
- To familiarize yourself with the electric current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that yous're not just repeating what others accept already done
- To identify gaps in noesis and unresolved issues that your enquiry tin can address
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the central findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights information technology volition contribute.
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