How to Write a Qualitative Research Proposal Literature Review
What Is a Literature Review | Pace-past-Step Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, assuasive you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such equally books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are five central steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify 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 state of cognition on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or enquiry paper, you will have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance 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
- Prove how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a fence
You might also have to write a literature review as a stand up-alone consignment. In this instance, the purpose is to evaluate the current land of enquiry and demonstrate your cognition of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content volition expect slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly of import skill if you want to utilize for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Stride 1: Search for relevant literature
Before you begin searching for literature, y'all need a clearly defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research trouble and questions.
If yous are writing a literature review as a stand up-alone assignment, y'all will take to cull a focus and develop a fundamental question to directly your search. Dissimilar a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer information technology based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Start by creating a listing of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables yous're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you lot discover new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body paradigm, 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 articles include:
- Your university's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
You can use boolean operators to assist narrow down your search:
- AND: to find sources that contain more than one keyword (e.m. social media AND body epitome AND generation Z)
- OR: to find sources that incorporate ane of a range of synonyms (e.k. 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 article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful volume or article, y'all can check the bibliography to discover other relevant sources.
To place the virtually important publications on your topic, take notation of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles go along appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
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Step 2: Evaluate and select sources
Yous probably won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you'll have to evaluate which sources are virtually 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 fundamental theories, models and methods? Does the inquiry use 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 it confirm, add to, or claiming 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 research?
Brand sure the sources you use are apparent, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You tin can discover out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a high citation count means the commodity has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.
The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might have a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).
Have 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.
It is of import to keep runway of your sources with citations to avert plagiarism. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full commendation data and write a paragraph of summary and assay for each source. This helps y'all remember what y'all read and saves fourth dimension later in the process.
Pace iii: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To brainstorm organizing your literature review'south argument and construction, yous need to understand the connections and relationships between the sources yous've read. Based on your reading and notes, you tin expect for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): practice sure approaches become more than or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur beyond the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that inverse the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are at that place weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This step will help yous piece of work out the construction of your literature review and (if applicable) testify how your ain research will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Most research has focused on young women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- But at that place is nevertheless a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could accost in your ain enquiry.
Stride four: Outline your literature review'south structure
In that location are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You lot should accept a rough idea of your strategy earlier you commencement writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, merely each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid but listing and summarizing sources in society.
Try to analyze patterns, turning points and fundamental debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you take found some recurring central themes, you tin can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if you are reviewing literature almost inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economical access.
Methodological
If you depict your sources from different disciplines or fields that apply a diverseness of enquiry methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:
- Expect at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative enquiry
- Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is oftentimes the foundation for a theoretical framework. Y'all can use information technology to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You might debate for the relevance of a specific theoretical arroyo, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Stride v: Write your literature review
Like whatever other bookish text, your literature review should have an introduction, a chief body, and a conclusion. What y'all 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 separate the body into subsections. You can apply a subheading for each theme, time menstruation, or methodological approach.
As you write, you 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 ain interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to depict connections, comparisons and contrasts
Determination
In the decision, you should summarize the key 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 earlier submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr's professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
In that location are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of noesis on your topic
- To ensure that you're non just repeating what others have already washed
- To identify gaps in noesis and unresolved problems that your research tin accost
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your piece of work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.
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