Writing a Literature Review

Writing a Literature Review What is a literature review? A critical look at the existing research that is significant to the work that you are carrying out.

Questions a literature review should answer 1. What do we already know in the immediate area concerned? 2. What are the characteristics of the key concepts or the main factors or variables? 3. What are the relationships between these key concepts, factors or variables? 4. What are the existing theories? 5. Where are the inconsistencies or other shortcomings in our knowledge and understanding? 6. What views need to be (further) tested? 7. What evidence is lacking, inconclusive, contradictory or too limited? 8. Why study (further) the research problem? 9. What contribution can the present study be expected to make? 10. What research designs or methods seem unsatisfactory?

What does a bad literature review look like? Clark (1997) conducted interviews with 20 men and women who work in a large corporation. His findings indicate that men are more satisfied with their jobs than women Clark and Warr (1996), using a large survey of 10,000 British employees, found that men are less satisfied with their jobs than women Better?

Better? Several research studies have examined the relationship between gender and job satisfaction (Clark, 1997; Clark and Warr, 1996; Smith, 2005; Jones, 2008). In particular, Clark (1997) found that men are more satisfied with their jobs than women, while Clark and Warr (1996) found the opposite. In both studies limitations are evident…

HOW CAN I WRITE A GOOD LITERATURE REVIEW? Remember the purpose: it should answer the questions we looked at above. Look at how published writers review the literature. The LR should be done to demonstrate why you feel future research should continue on this topic Read with a purpose: you need to summarize the work you read but you must also decide which ideas or information are important to your research (so you can emphasize them), and which are less important and can be covered briefly or left out of your review

Write with a purpose: your aim should be to evaluate and show relationships between the work already done (Is Researcher Y's theory more convincing than Researcher X's? Did Researcher X build on the work of Researcher Y?) and between this work and your own.

So, you need to think about how you are going to organize your work Before you can successfully do this you have to have streamlined your research topic Reading is going to help to do this…so don’t just choose the first 5 articles you come across and call it a day. Scan them and determine if they help you to refine your topic. Once you have refined the topic… I like to use headings/subheadings right away that relate to what I want to communicate

Some traps to avoid Trying to read everything! if you try to be comprehensive you will never be able to finish the reading! The idea of the literature review is not to provide a summary of all the published work that relates to your research, but a survey of the most relevant and significant work. Reading but not writing! don't put writing off until you've "finished" reading - after all, you will probably still be doing some reading all the way through to the end of your research project

Not keeping bibliographic information Not keeping bibliographic information! always keep this information in your notes. Always put references into your writing.

Now what? You have refined your topic You have completed a fabulous literature review Make sure you are citing properly and completing a proper citation page!!

APA documentation Tutorial: http://www.apastyle.org/learn/tutorials/basics-tutorial.aspx

Your literature review What is the topic of your review? What is the research question that is structuring the review? What are the key search words that you used to research the topic? What are some of the key findings on this topic? What questions (found on slide 3) can/will my literature review answer? List all that you feel you could cover in the review.