How to write a Literature Review?
Literature review • December 15, 2008
From the articles that you have seen in this site like research paper writing, essay writing, methodology format etc. I hope that you people got some idea about presenting a paper to public. When we are writing a particular topic in a paper and presenting it means, then it is necessary that we should point out each and every resource that we used to prepare it. It means when we are preparing a research paper, or methodology, then during that time we may refer some resources, books, articles. So we should refer all those things in our paper for future reference and for the sake of people who are going to get benefited from it.
Literature Review is the one which helps us in specifying the resources that we used while in preparing the articles or the paper that we had done of our own. It surveys scholarly articles, books and other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, providing a description, summary, and critical evaluation of each work. Through it people can get what we are trying to say through our paper in a much easier way. The purpose of a literature review is to offer an overview of significant literature published on a topic.
In this section we will see about the elements of Literature Review, they are
* An overview of the subject, issue or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review.
* Dividing the work into many categories, which is under the review.
* Explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others.
* Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research.
Based on these elements we should prepare the Literature Review. Now we will see about the steps required to prepare it.
* Define your topic: Here we should define and explain some points about the topic that we are going to discuss.
* Search for materials: For the topic that we had chosen, we will search through some search tools about it and frame the idea to write it.
* Evaluate: After getting the required materials, we should evaluate it based on some criteria and try to choose important points based on it.
* Analysis and interpretation: From the points that we had chosen, we should analyze the data and interpret the results based on it.
While evaluation processes the things that we should follow are Provenance, Objectivity, Persuasiveness, and Value. While searching and getting the required data, we should try to get some useful points from it. So for this we need an evaluation process to be carried on the data.
The main purpose of Literature Review writing is it constitutes the essential part of our dissertation or thesis. The other purposes are clear understanding of the subject under review, explaining the relationships under consideration, identifying new ways to interpret, resolving conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies etc,.
Thus, literature review helps to get a clear cut idea about the subject that we are going to discuss in our work. So while preparing any kinds of papers, give full importance to Literature Review too and make it as an quality work.
Written by George Nelson
I have been working as a professor for many years. In my experience, students fail to write their papers because they lack knowledge and bravery to ask for help. Here, I am able to help scholars learn, evolve, research, and understand. There is nothing difficult about philosophy, religion, and I am here to prove it.
Keep reading