Can You Use Non Research Articles in a Literature Review
What Is a Literature Review | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of electric current noesis, allowing y'all to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing enquiry.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such equally books and journal manufactures), critically analyzing them, and explaining what y'all establish. There are five key steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the construction
- Write your literature review
A skilful literature review doesn't just summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the discipline.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When yous write a thesis, dissertation, or research newspaper, you volition 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
- Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the electric current country of research and demonstrate your noesis of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will expect slightly different in each case, only the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a peculiarly of import skill if yous want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Pace 1: Search for relevant literature
Before you lot begin searching for literature, you need a conspicuously 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 as a stand-lone assignment, you lot will accept to choose a focus and develop a cardinal question to direct your search. Dissimilar a dissertation research question, this question has to exist answerable without collecting original information. You should be able to answer it based but on a review of existing publications.
Brand a listing of keywords
Beginning by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the fundamental concepts or variables you're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you lot detect new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Torso image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and manufactures include:
- Your university'south library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economic science)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
You lot tin can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to find sources that contain more than one keyword (e.g. social media AND body image AND generation Z)
- OR: to find sources that incorporate ane of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing certain terms (east.thou. apple tree NOT fruit)
Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you lot find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to discover other relevant sources.
To identify the most important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles go on actualization in your reading, brand certain to seek them out.
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Stride 2: Evaluate and select sources
Y'all probably won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you'll have to evaluate which sources are nigh relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or trouble is the writer addressing?
- What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the inquiry use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your agreement of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make sure the sources you use are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You can notice out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a high citation count ways the commodity 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 commonly only review recent literature, simply in the humanities you might take 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, you should also brainstorm the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is of import to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you call back what you read and saves fourth dimension later in the process.
Pace iii: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review'south argument and structure, y'all need to understand the connections and relationships betwixt the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): exercise sure approaches become more or less pop over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where exercise sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there whatsoever influential theories or studies that inverse the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that demand to be addressed?
This pace will assist you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicative) bear witness how your own inquiry will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Near research has focused on immature women.
- There is an increasing involvement in the visual aspects of social media.
- Merely there is withal a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could accost in your own research.
Step four: Outline your literature review's structure
There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You should have a rough thought of your strategy earlier you outset writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous tin combine several of these strategies (for case, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if y'all choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.
Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that take shaped the direction of the field. Give your estimation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If y'all have institute some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that accost different aspects of the topic.
For example, if you lot are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, linguistic communication barriers, cultural attitudes, legal condition, and economical access.
Methodological
If you depict your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a diversity of research methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:
- Await at what results take 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 often the foundation for a theoretical framework. Yous can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of cardinal concepts.
You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your inquiry.
Step v: Write your literature review
Like any other academic text, your literature review should take an introduction, a primary body, and a determination. What yous include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should conspicuously establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.
Every bit you lot write, you can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: requite an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Analyze and translate: don't just paraphrase other researchers—add together your own 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: utilise transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Decision
In the conclusion, y'all should summarize the key findings you lot have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When you lot've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a linguistic communication good? Check out Scribbr's professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a enquiry project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current country of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you're not just repeating what others have already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your inquiry can address
- 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 work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.
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