The term Review of Related Literature is pretty self explanatory- it is a detailed reflection and summary of the scholarly articles and books related to your dissertation or thesis topic. Before conducting your study, a literature review of the topic is conducted. When you come across gaps and conflicts during the study of the literature relevant to your research, you have to address how your study aims to resolve that issue or investigate it.
Before actually writing the literature review, you must identify the literature that you will be reading and analysing. Know your objective for perusing through all the material and decide how you will organise this information.
When you’re finished reading this article, you will be well acquainted with the purpose and method of writing a well-structured and meaningful related literature review.
Purpose of a literature review
Let us first find out what is a literature review in a report. Knowing the objective of writing this section of your research paper is extremely essential before looking for relevant publications. A good RRL provides the reader with a the following information:
- Major formative works in that field and how they created the basis of knowledge for that topic
- Researchers who have performed important research on the topic
- Main ideas, theories and conclusions regarding the topic
- Similarities and differences between the theories and findings
- Gaps in the knowledge or questions left unanswered in previous researches
- How the study you are conducting is important and will address the inconsistencies in current works
Thought process during the review
There must be so many things on your mind when you are looking for research material and reading it all. When you start your search, try to look for already existing literature reviews in databases on your topic of research- this will give you a very good direction to work with. If you are working on a topic related to science and technology, look for more recent research material because the older ones have outdated and irrelevant information. However, if your topic is related to humanities or social sciences, you can include older research material as well.
When you are reading the research material, it has to be a very focused, analytic research. You need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Checking credibility
- Ethical considerations
- The political, socio-economic, religious, etc. conditions at the time of the research
- Validity of the method used and were all the variables considered?
- Is the problem addressed important?
- Are the findings convincing enough?
- Compared with other research, is it unusual or supportive of it?
Here are some online resources to look for research material:
Writing and structuring the review
Reading and making notes
When you are reading the research material, it is important to read in a critical manner and make notes along the way. Some important things that you should be noting down are:
- Author’s credentials and the credibility of the source
- Methods used as evidence- case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings, etc.
- Methodology used and whether the sample size was appropriate
- Was contrary data taken into consideration?
- Is the conclusion convincing enough and what does it contribute to the field?
When you’ve written a considerable amount of material, you should have a look at your notes and look for the connections in all the text. What were the trends over time and how did they change? Which one of these researches were the most influential ones? Identify which ones are contradicting each other. Then look for the gap in all of this- the missing information.
Structuring the literature review
Having attained a holistic overview of all the literature, you will now be able to organise it in a manner that will be understandable for the reader. You can use any one of the following methods to make a structure for your literature review:
Chronological: A summary of how the themes and discussions on the topic changed with time.
Thematic: Organise the papers according to the theme that they focus on and discuss.
Methodological: Group the different literature according to the methodology used by them- quantitative, qualitative, or the type of source they used (historical, cultural, social, etc.).
Theoretical: You can also organise the review by the theory that the research paper discusses.
Writing the literature review
The literature review should have an introduction, body and conclusion. Take a look at this sample. This will also give you an example literature review structure. There is an introduction and conclusion and the body has several themes outlined with a clear topic.
Introduction: Clearly state the purpose of the literature review and a short summary of the scholarly text.
Body: Within each of these topics, different papers are discussed and your own opinion on the paper is given as well. Do not just paraphrase the author’s words, give analysis of the strengths and weaknesses too.
Conclusion: In conclusion, it is important to summarise all the themes and how your study will fit into the missing knowledge on this topic.
Remember to proofread the entire literature review when you are done. Check the logical flow of what you have written and see if it is sound enough.
Remember to cite
When you are done writing all this, it is important to include all the citations in the relevant format. You can follow any of the following formats, according to the requirements of your research paper (your discipline and the publishing house):
- APA format
- ACS format
- MLA format
- Chicago style format
Conclusion
The literature review is very important for your research paper as it grounds your study in the field and provides the theoretical framework. Make sure to get it checked and proofread before you proceed with the rest of your paper. Our expert writers can help you fix the sections where you get stuck.
